I was trying to think of how many surviving examples of advanced World War II electronics and munitions are still around. To explain, the "advanced" qualifier was included to eliminate run-of-the-mill radios such as the
BC-342 or
ARC-5. It is also meant to point to the fact that most of these were late war designs.
For example, what initially started my thoughts on the subject was the
APS-4 under-wing pod I ran into at Pima a few years ago. For some reason there are a lot of them out there:
On the other hand, a quick search turned up no surviving examples of the APS-6 radar that mounted on the leading edge of F6F wings or the nose of P-38Ms.
As far as the bigger radars go, an
APS-20 exists at the
Science and Industry Museum in Manchester and there's an SCR-720 night fighter radar at the
National Electronics Museum.
Given that most of this equipment would have been removed by civilians who had no use for dead weight in their warbirds, I figure much of it did not survive - at least not in the aircraft themselves. If any of the electronics exist, it would most likely be thanks to amateur radio enthusiasts who picked it up surplus on the cheap. (There are, of course some aircraft in museums, the
Enola Gay is a good example, that still have their original equipment, but even that is can be rare until you get to the Cold War era aircraft.) For that same reason, I don't know of many warbirds flying that have had the original equipment reinstalled. For example, the
Mid-Atlantic Air Museum's P-61 has an SCR-720 and the Commemorative Air Force was looking for an SCR-717 Pathfinder radome to mount on That's All Brother. They
apparently were able to make an aluminum reproduction of the radome, but I doubt there's complete set inside.
The other half of the question - munitions - is about equipment like the
SWOD (aka the ASM-N-2 Bat), of which there are
seven examples still remaining at places like the
National Institute of Standards and Technology and, again, the
Pima Air & Space Museum. This interest was the result of seeing whether it would be possible to find examples to study to recreate examples of the
Tiny Tim rocket or
GT-1 for the Tri-State Warbird Museum's FG-1 and B-25 respectively. (As to why, the aircraft log books for BuNo 92132 include a comment that it carried a Tiny Tim on at least one flight and the GT-1 was made by Aeronca, which was of course a local company.) Unfortunately, there are no surviving GT-1s and I have yet to come across any technical manuals or blueprints for it. Luckily, there is at least one surviving Tiny Tim at the
National Air and Space Museum.
I'm sure there are more out there, so please feel free to make suggestions as to what I missed.
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