Warbird Information Exchange

" Doomed from the Start " is probably one of the best aviation books I have ever read. " Destination Corregidor " is another great book about the submarine resupply of Corregidor until the surrender.

Unknown to me, thirteen months before I began this thread Cory Graff wrote an article for Air and Space Magazine titled "These Frankenplanes Are Built From Parts of Other Planes". It mentions some of the aircraft already covered in this thread - the DC-2 1/2, Little Miss Mischief - but it also brings up some new ones. There was another B-17G with the 457th Bomb Group named Arf n’ Arf that was made from part of one damaged in a ground collision. In another case, similar to the Qantas case mentioned in a previous post, the Boeing 707 damaged by a bomb after the hijacking of TWA Flight 840, N776TW, was repaired with a new-build nose section from Boeing to become N28714.

I searched for the term "Frankenplane" while trying to find the article on another computer and came up with a number of relevant results. One is an article about the story of the rebuilding of one of Torpedo Squadron Eight's damaged TBF Avengers on Henderson Field from the remains of five airframes. The other is "a concept FAA Safety Briefing first explored in [an] article called 'Beware the Frankenplane!' [in the May/June 2014 issue]" and revisited in the March/April 2022 issue "Frankenstein's Airplane" about the dangers of "layering" supplemental type certificates.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster

Here's what you may have been referring to, a well and truly zapped A-1E.


Back in my dim youth I recall reading about some "Tales from Vietnam" story that there was an instance of an aft fuselage of an A-1E being mated to the front of single seat A-1. It had some differing flight characteristics but was otherwise OK.

Originally built as NC16009 for American Airlines, this was the FIRST DC-3. In 1959 her aft fuselage was damaged by a C-46 that had a gear collapse on landing in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The aft fuselage from a C-47 was grafted on and she continued service. Now on display in Puerto Alegre, Brazil.





Cubs2jets

Just in case anyone thought that this sort of thing had stopped, according to a news article the Air Force is currently gluing back of one F-35 that suffered a nose gear failure, 17-5269, to the nose of another damaged in an engine fire, 10-5015.

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Tri-State Warbird Museum Collections Manager & Museum Attendant

Warbird Philosophy Webmaster

Any Stearman rebuilt from an old sprayer probably has parts in it from every year they were made!

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Defending Stearmans on WIX since Jeff started badmouthing them back in 2005.

The engineering side of that would have been incredibly challenging and, in an era where cameras were plentiful, there are no pictures? Never say never, but that is most likely a wive's tale or the innocent twisting of a real story.

Ken

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"Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves."

If there was only one set of “wide” fuselage tooling (which I think was the case) I could see that being done. A lot of work, yes, but the engineering was probably more “eyeball” and along the lines of “that’ll never break now” than anything else.

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Defending Stearmans on WIX since Jeff started badmouthing them back in 2005.

I just wanted to say 1) I'm really enjoying the thread and reading the stories, and b) seeing the real "GLUE SECTION A TO B" makes me very happy! How cool!

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Zac in NZ
#avgeek, modelbuilder, photographer, writer. Callsign: "HANDBAG".
https://linktr.ee/zacyates

"It's his plane, he spent the money to restore it, he can do with it what he wants. I will never understand what's hard to comprehend about this." - kalamazookid, 20/08/2013
"The more time you spend around warbirds the sooner you learn nothing, is simple." - JohnB, 24/02/22