Warbird Information Exchange

It was Bill Stebbins' dream to one day fly in his own Curtiss P-40 fighter plane. It was a dream that took him to the wilds of Alaska in 1976 to bring back the wreckage of a downed World War II P-40 and have it trucked all the way back to Louisville. Last Wednesday his widow Mary Jo Stebbins watched as pieces of her husband's dream were loaded into a shipping container bound for Australia ... and a new life.

Stebbins, 71, died in April and he never got around to completing the P-40. Raising a family and running his aviation company in Southern Louisville took precedence. A fire leveled the business in 2001, burning up the plane's fuselage. The largest remaining pieces — a pair of wings kept outside — escaped the fire.

Those wings, with frayed aluminum skin at the edges that are still heavy with silt from the riverbed Stebbins rescued them from 38 years ago, were purchased by Rob Greinert from Sydney, Australia. Greinert operates a "flying aircraft museum" where patrons can watch historic planes take to the sky. Greinert plans to make the plane whole again and add it to the museum's flying stock.

"It's a flying memorial," said Greinert. "It's for veterans and it's for education."

Bill Stebbins recounted his adventure to Alaska in a Courier-Journal article in November of 1976. Stebbins had been looking for a P-40 for several years when he got a letter from another airplane enthusiast saying that a trapper had been running his trap line for several years near some wreckage in Alaska. Stebbins traded a "bear gun" for information about the whereabouts of the plane.

The plane crash landed in 1944. The pilot survived the wreck, but the airplane sat for more than three decades. Over time, the plane sank in the riverbed and was covered in silt. Only the fuselage was showing when Stebbins reached the wreckage. The article goes on to describe Stebbins' odyssey recovering the plane and a black-and-white photo shows him smiling from the cockpit.

Thirty-eight years later, Mary Jo Stebbins smiles as she watched a crane and forklift maneuver the wings into a shipping container. Ten feet away, a wreath hung on a window of their business with the name "Bill" written on white ribbon with black ink. "It's bittersweet," said Mary Jo Stebbins, smiling.

According to Mary Jo Stebbins, her husband had been approached about selling the wings many times over the years, mainly by people who wanted to re-sell them, but he never did.

"He wanted to sell them to Rob (Greinert)," she said "Bill wanted to see the plane fly again ... and this will complete his dream"