“You should have seen it before we started,” said Taigh Ramey of Vintage Aircraft and Stockton Field Aviation Museum in Stockton, California. He was talking about the ultra-rare Lockheed PV-2D long-range patrol bomber restored at the museum over the past three years. And with the series of before-and-after photos on the museum website, you can.
Only 35 of the -2D variants of the airplane were built, designed for the invasion of Japan that never happened because the atomic bomb ended the war. This particular airplane left Lockheed’s Burbank assembly line in 1944, and has remarkably low time. After the war it was mustered out of service and worked as a firebomber, but not for long. It only has 800 hours’ total time on the airframe, and only 40 hours each on the Pratt & Whitney R2800 engines.
