Corsair

It’s well they didn’t, as we would not only have been denied the sight and sound of this warbird on the wing, but the equally incredible tale that attends its restoration.

Provenance

The story begins in 1989 as Graham Hoskings and Judy Pay, in a Piper Navajo acquired on the cheap in Africa, begin scouring the South- West Pacific for rusting, wrecked aircraft in the jungle. A tip-off leads them to a Errumango Islandin Vanuatu where, in 1942, six USAAF Merlin-engined Curtiss P-40F-1-CUs of the 44th Fighter Squadron, 18th Fighter Group, had force-landed due to fuel starvation on a navigation exercise. Four were recovered at the time, with the two left behind stripped of useable parts and abandoned to the elements until, eventually, they were shipped back to Australia to be restored. One of these (the more complete of the recovered wrecks) is airworthy today, magnificently restored by Judy Pay and flying as the Bone Crusher, resplendent in its original USAAF serial of 41-14112.

Graham Hoskings found himself in possession of the less complete, remaining airframe, and as the restoration process began was soon in direct competition with his friend, associate and business partner, Judy Pay, in the worldwide hunt for components for the very rare Merlin-powered Kittyhawk. “

It won’t be hard at all

As luck would have it, Graham was on the receiving end of an offer from the RNZAF Museum: trade the incomplete P-40 for a structurally complete, late war F4U-5N Corsair, which the museum had received as a gift from the Walt Disney Company for the RNZAF’s assistance in the making of the 1988 movie The Rescue. Driving the exchange was the RNZAF Museum’s keenness to acquire an authentic P-40, a type responsible for 99 of the RNZAF’s wartime air-to-air kills. The Kittyhawk thus overshadowed the contribution of the Corsair to NZ military history and in any event, the mark inherited by the museum was a late war -5N, a variant never operated by the Kiwis.

Sentiment and pragmatism drove a deal that saw Hoskings’ incomplete P-40 project loaded into the back of a RNZAF Hercules for Wigram, (once the Corsair wings had been unloaded), while the Corsair fuselage made its way across the Tasman by ship.

And it was the unloading of this fuselage section that was to portend the myriad adversities faced by Hoskings, his wife Kerry and his chief engineer, Nobby Bartsch.

“We offloaded the fuselage at the wharf in Melbourne and at the time there was a lot of union difficulty and strikes,” recalled Hoskings.

“So we drove the truck into the ship, loaded the [Corsair] onto the back of the truck, with a temporary apparatus supporting [it] because the wheels were 1. 5 metres each side of the tray too big – we had to build a steel apparatus to support the aircraft. So, we rolled the Corsair onto the apparatus, started it up and drove it past all the unionists and drove it down to Tyabb. A monumental job in itself. ” Reassembled at the hangar, the apparently complete F4U-5N Corsair represented, it was thought, a straightforward restoration project“Having looked at it, I thought ‘this thing’s pretty complete by comparison to the P-40. All you have to do is take it apart, paint it, decide on the colours, overhaul the motor and it won’t be hard at all’ ”.

Unbeknownst to Hoskings and Bartsch was that they had acquired a warbird of rare and inordinate complexity, and in this case, an airframe bereft of internal rams, hydraulics, linkages and plumbing. Restoring this aircraft to airworthiness was to be a challenge several orders of magnitude greater than any the pair had faced previously.

As Hoskings relates, “I didn’t know that to restore the Corsair – I’ve had experts tell me since – it’s an undertaking that is at least three, but more probably five times more difficult than overhauling a Mustang. It’s due to the complexity of the aircraft. It’s much heavier in every respect, designed to be thumped onto an aircraft carrier, and everything about it is beefier,

He said ‘congratulations you’ve picked the most difficult aircraft to restore of all of them’ and sure enough, that’s true.

heavier, stronger, there’s much more componentry, such as the rams that operate the flaps, which come in multiple, hinging sections. It was a very expensive aircraft to build in the first place, whereas the Mustang, Spit or Kittyhawk are relatively simple by comparison.

“And when I went to America, a fellow named Nelson Azelle, who I worked with very extensively, said ‘congratulations you’ve picked the most difficult aircraft to restore of all of them’ and sure enough, that’s true. It’s a very complicated aircraft that needs lots of hydraulics, levers, pipes, tubes. And everything has to function properly. ”

Bent Winged Bird

The post-war Corsair now hangared at Tyabb was a Chance Vought F4U- 5N, originally a radar-equipped night fighter that saw service in Korea.

It had then been transferred to the Fuerza Aérea Hondureña, where it had seen combat during that country’s brief but bloody skirmish with El Salvador in 1969.

The -5 represented the near pinnacle of Corsair development, its design having been influenced by experienced combat pilots of earlier marks.

Basically similar to the F4U-4, the -5 featured signature cheek intake scoops for the water injected 2,675hp (1,995kW) R-2800- 32W’s variable-speed two stage superchargers, which helped bestow upon the fighter truly remarkable performance. The new powerplant changed the nose profile of the Corsair and altered the thrustline downwards by 2. 75 per cent, improving stabilty and pilot visibility. As a night fighter the F4U-5N incorporated a number of features unique to the 214 examples of this variant: starboard wingmounted APS-6 or APS-19A radar set, exhaust flame shields and flash hiders on its four 20m cannon. “There were basically six different models – ours was a late model, built in 1946/47, it had been used on a carrier during the Korean War and then after that it was in storage and then was amongst a group of aircraft that was refurbished and given to the Honduran air force. Ours being a -5N, there were less than 250 examples of it, and we thought it being a late model aircraft we’d be able to find parts readily. But the truth was there were so few produced, that the availability of parts was less than that of the WW2 era -1s, 2s, 3s and 4s. We could find more parts for them than the Korean War versions…” Before the hunt for missing componentry could begin, Hoskings and Bartsch set about confirming the identity of the Corsair, it having come from scrapyard after itsservice with the FAH ended in 1979.

“People in the US who’d researched [the Corsair’s identity] said it was a compilation of different aircraft. That’s not true.

We initially thought it was serialled 608 and as we broke it apart it was obviously a complete, original aircraft with a replaced wing. As we took it apart we got strong references to the fact that it was, in fact, 603. And, when we took the instrument panel apart, it said 03.

We received pictures of the aircraft in the boneyard in Honduran capital with clear description of 603 and it had had portions of the skin removed from the tail cone. When we got the aircraft, it had been repaired in that quadrant. And it was very bad quality repair – it was in jeopardy of being structurally unsound, and it took us many months to repair the repair. ”

A Move North

Having received the F4U-5N, Hoskings was involved in not one, but two serious aircraft accidents,a year apart. One, in which he was a passenger, claimed the life of legendary warbird pilot Guido Zuccoli, and forced a rethink about the entire restoration project.

“We were all feeling pretty low about the whole thing. And the decision was made to get Nobby to restore this Corsair and send it to Aerotech in Darwin, thinking it would be finished in three to five years. Nobby and his assistant Roy came down, broke the aircraft down to components, put it on a trailer in a wooden framework and shipped it up to Darwin. When they started looking at how complex it was, and what was missing, the first thing they had to do was get film in from the Smithsonian Institution showing them what a model 5 should look like and what goes into it. And Nobby realised the huge shortage of parts and realised we couldn’t get it to go until we found every little bit,” Bartsch then began a fruitless round of correspondence and phone calls with owners and restorersof Corsairs the world over. Those in possession of parts were either reluctant to help, or instead insisted on trading parts for other parts.

Frustratingly, components that were acquired were found to be either incorrect, corroded or rusted, prompting the team to ditch the indirect approach and simply go to the source.

Their opportunity arose after being invited to a Corsair symposium in Indianapolis, one that brought together anyone ever associated with Chance Vought’s masterpiece. Having travelled from Australia to attend, the trio were afforded every courtesy by their hosts, but the spare parts needed to kickstart the restoration – the very reason for the trip – proved elusive.

Again, they had come up against the laws of supply and demand and a reluctance by those holding parts to sell them outright.

As Hoskings explained: “If you look up the Corsair registry, there’s about 100 aircraft left. Of those, 40 are like a pile of bits in someone’s shed. Some are so small they consist of a tail cone, elevator and ashtray.

But they have a serial number, a history and they’re called ‘a project’.

There’s lots of projects scattered around the world, but they’ll never be a viable project as a restorable thing.

Of the remaining 60 odd aircraft, a significant number of those are in museums and won’t ever fly.

“Of the remainder that are either flying or capable of being restored to flight, lots of those are projects that are unlikely, I think, to be restored in the next 40 or 50 years.

Having done one, and realising how hard parts are to get and the level of engineering skill needed to, to use Nobby’s phraseology, ‘wear down the problem’, you need immense determination, doggedness, engineering skill to just do the mechanical stuff, and that’s if you’ve got parts available. Beingan aircraft hardly ever used in and around Australia, to try and restore one from here is almost impossible. ” Having left the symposium with almost nothing, Hoskings and Bartsch resolved to make a return trip to the US, and to acquire the parts they needed using a far more persuasive medium of exchange – cold, hard cash.

“I decided I was going to have to go [to America], lay out the things that I wanted, amongst the people that were prepared to sell them, then negotiate, piece by piece, a price, then shell out the money, put them into a vehicle and then drive off with them. So I went back to Australia, worked hard, acquired a stack of money – in the order of $120,000 in US dollars – put it into a handbag, went to customs at Melbourne Airport, declared the money, flew to the US, declared the funds, where they photocopied my passport and all my details.

Being an aircraft hardly ever used in and around Australia, to try and restore one from here is almost impossible.

So, I’ve got a small suitcase and a handbag full of money and a hire car with unlimited mileage” Hoskings, his wife and Bartsch then embarked upon a two-week cross-country odyssey, rising at 6am and driving through to the wee hours, as they criss-crossed the country in search of Corsair parts.

From Los Angeles, to San Francisio, on to Chino, Reno, then due north to Kalispell near the Canadian border, then across to Chicago, down to St Louis, before unloading the precious trove at a fellow warbird restorer’s facility in Texas.

“As we were driving, we’d phone people in advance, meet up with them, talk to them, discuss Corsairs, go through their spares, make decisions of what we could and couldn’t buy, agree on certain items, shell out money, throw parts in the back of our van and be off again.

“At the end of the trip we’d significantly acquired what we needed but we had also changed the demand and values of Corsair parts throughout the whole country – there are so few parts, so few people who have them, and so few that people will sell. I met up with a Corsair rebuilder who I’d got along with previously and he said ‘I don’t know whether to welcome you or punch you in the nose!’ ” Having covered 16,000km in a little over two weeks, the exhausted but elated trio repaired to Breckinbridge in Texas, where they left their hard won haul in the care of warbird rebuilders, Ezell Aviation. Hoskings recalled: “We had a really good feeling about what we’d achieved, even though we upset a few American collectors…” Now, all that was left to do was await the parts’ arrival in Australia and the Corsair restoration project would begin in earnest. This sunny assumption had one flaw: it had failed to make allowance for some good old-fashioned human fallibility. “In the first week of December, we got a phone call and I was anticipating these things’ arrival. What had happened was that the truck driver had turned up at Breckinridge with two containers on his truck. He unloaded the wrong container, that was then loaded with our parts, and it got sent to the back streets of Osaka in Japan.

When the Japanese dock worker looked inside, he saw whopping great big military looking drop tanks and he was convinced they were atomic bombs – this was around the time 9/11 had occurred. So he called the police, army, navy – everyone he could think of. All came rushing around and eventually the air force guy said ‘nothing to worry about they’re old drop tanks’. “So all hell broke loose. The information went back to US Customs, who asked to see our permit to export ex-military aircraft parts. We didn’t have one. The container then went back to the States, where it was impounded and we were threatened with all sorts of fines. It took me 18 months, and about US$25,000 to overcome the problem of getting the parts released from Customs control.

Night after night, I was getting up in the middle of the night to try and make contact with some woman in Border Protection who would then hand me over to someone in some other bureaucratic department. ” Eventually, with the help of a local politician, Graham Hoskings managed to release the container, but only after agreeing in writing not to sell the 60-year-old Corsair to another country without the express permission of the US government.

Back On Track

With the restoration in Darwin now underway thanks to the arrival of the spare parts, progress was being made, albeit with the odd setback.

The Territory’s humidity, for example, was to play havoc with the curing process of various fabriccovered control surfaces.

“The elevators are sewn and then have strips of fabric over the top of the stitching, but then they have a plate of aluminium on top, which is then riveted, then has two strips of tape on top of the aluminium. We then shrunk the material using Ceconite and the first time we doped the material it all went loose. It didn’t dry, it wouldn’t dry. So after an extensive discussion, we got hold of a knife and cut all the fabric off. We undrilled the rivets and did it all again. It sounds complicated to do that, but when you considerthat we had to pack the rudder, elevators into a box, send them to Melbourne because the climate was more forgiving than in Darwin, then we sent them back up to Darwin, where they were painted up in the correct scheme, we got the rudder up and Nobby dropped it, so we had to turn around and box it up and send it back to Melbourne, repair and repaint.

Unbelievable amounts of effort each time. ” As the years ticked by, further global searches for spare parts were mounted, taking Hoskings and Nobby as far afield as the UK and France, and, on three occasions, Central America. It was during these visits to the former home of his Corsair that Hoskings became something of a celebrity, giving TVinterviews such was the interest in the project slowly taking shape in distant Australia.

Fast forward to May 5 2014, when test pilot Peter Clements took Corsair, ex FAH603, now VH-III (hence ‘Triple India’), on its first post restoration flight. Gone was the original R2800‑32W engine and its superchargers and water injection, replaced with less powerful civilian equivalent, the CB-16.

As the aircraft climbed skywards and began its ungainly gear retraction sequence, there were many elated and relieved onlookers, not the least of which was Graham Hoskings, Nobby Bartsch and many others intimately involved with the flight.

Reflecting on how he felt at the culmination of two decades of effort, Hoskings paused: “I think what you’re looking for is words like ‘excitement’ or ‘ecstatic’ or something like that. I was certainly relieved for the completion of the project and to see the test pilot didn’t injure himself or the plane.

The aircraft came back requiring very little in the way of modification or adjustment. That was very satisfying – probably more so to Nobby than me. Am I proud of it? Yes. Am I excited about it? Yes. But it’s a great achievement, I’m glad it’s completed. I knew it would fly when it was ready. We met some wonderful people and if it wasn’t for them, I think I would have become totally frustrated waiting for it to be completed… I would have given up and sold the bloody thing. ”