Neal Nurmi wrote:
I'm gonna show my ignorance, here (or maybe my rapidly depleting memory banks), but what is the origin of the white over grey with red lightning bolt color scheme? Is it a Hawkins and Power thing, Canadian military, or what. As well as many Neptunes there were a bunch of C-119s up in Greybull after they were banned from dropping. I seem to remember them being ex-Canadian and I remember something with that lightning bolt. I'm afraid I'm not much of a markings guy...
Quite a few ex-Canadian aircraft had later lives as fire bombers, including the C-119's that flew with Hawkins and Powers in essentially their RCAF scheme, and several ex-Canadian P2V Neptune's which went through several operators as air tankers. The lightning bolt cheat line is very much common on Canadian military types. It seems some Neptune's retained essentially their Canadian schemes, and some P2V's were painted in something close to the Canadian scheme (like P2V 147957 at Pima which is preserved as a fire bomber in a 1975 Black Hills aviation scheme, much like the "Canadian" scheme, but I do not believe that example never flew with RCAF). So I'd suggest that some fire bombers retained their RCAF scheme, and some P2Vs form US sources were later painted in something close to the Canadian scheme, perhaps for fleet consistency. The color and lighting bolt is indeed a sharp look.
The Pima P2V:
https://pimaair.org/museum-aircraft/lockheed-p2v-7/