P-40 Question

[SaxMan]

While at home sick today, I was flipping through the channels and came across a show on the Military History Channel "The Real Flying Tigers". I imagine it was produced around 10 years ago. At the very end, the host, Arthur Kent, mentions that they found one of the original AVG P-40s at the bottom of a lake in China, and it is going to be recovered and restored. It would be the only surviving example from the original lot of 99 (?) planes issued to the AVG.

I tried using the search function on the site and found an incredible amount of entries regarding P-40s, but couldn't find anything on the plane described above. Can someone please enlighten me?

[Jack Cook]

Some speculated it was Older P-40B #68 but it;s John ed blackburn's
P-40E which he crash on a gunnery flying due to target fixation. Photps
of the crash site with the targets is in Larry Pistole's AVG photo book.
It's never been seen (I believe) or recovered.

[bdk]

http://www.sinoam.com/AVG/kunming.htm

Blackburn’s P-40 is encased in a dense layer of mud, approximately one meter below the lake floor.

They don't seem to indicate that any actual recovery was attempted, even though they have a "recovery boat." Maybe they expected it to just bob to the surface once they were in the general area?

[Django]

You would think they would want to recover it at least for one of their own museums.

[bdk]

I have received word that they are planning to attempt a recovery in the summer of 2009. I invited a spokesman from that group to post further details in this thread.