Author(s): John King

Aviation | New Zealand | World War II

This is a book about an aeroplane, a 1943 Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk flown for several months under difficult conditions in a remote tropical corner of the southwest Pacific. Abandoned at the side of an airstrip after a landing mishap, it lay forgotten for decades until it was retrieved and shipped to New Zealand. Even then it sat in storage for years before restoration work was started, and three years after that it once again took to the air, a fully rebuilt example of the heroic era of warbirds. The story of that retrieval, and the subsequent rebuild, is a story of individual determination, of personalities and ambitions. It has its roots in the days when aircraft hulks were just that, scrap aluminium cluttering up tropical forests and farmland, when few people had the vision to imagine rebuilding these once-magnificent machines to fly once more. Today the warbirds movements is a properly accepted part of the worldwide general aviation scene, but 40 years ago such visionaries were seen as slightly eccentric.