Douglas A-24 at the USAF Museum

[Pat Carry]

The A-24 currently on display at the USAF Museum is 42-54582. This plane is on loan from the Marine Air-Ground Museum at Quantico and has replaced A-24 Bu 10575 which was recently placed at Chicago's Midway Airport. www.warbirdregistry.org/sbdregistry/a24-4254582.html

[Jeff Funk]

Pat,


When did they switch the A-24's? I last visited Dayton in early Sept. and the A-24 appeared to be the same OD bird I saw several times over the summer and back in 2002. I have a picture of the grey Quantico Dauntless I took not long before the Marine Museum shut down. Did they temporarily repaint the Marine SBD? I hope to add my museum shots to my humble website this winter and I'd like to have the correct ID's.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Pat Carry]

Hi Jeff, I was at the museum in the 3rd week of Sept and photographed the A-24 they had on display at that time. Looking at my photo it is painted olive drab and has a tail number of 115786. It may have been repainted to represent an Army Air Corps plane instead of a Marine plane but that is just speculation on my part. My contact at the museum informed me just today via email that 42-54582 is the one I saw and that it is on loan from the Marine Museum. I can tell you that Bu 10575 went on display at Chicago's Midway Airport on August 3rd. I can only assume that the A-24 you saw in early Sept is the same one I saw. Hope this helps.

[Jack Cook]

Check out the pictures posted on the Warbird Registry of the Marine Corps Quantico Museum's SBD. JCW, his dad and brother got it from the City of Portland and restored her in the 70s. Their partners antics forced them to sell to Champlin then it went to the Marines.

[jcw]

if they didn't do anything to thr inside of the bird you will find my name inside as far aft in the tailcone as you can get.. had a lot of rivits and sheet metal work to do there and i signed and dated my name there with someone from the factory in 1942....

[RMAllnutt]

Hi JCW,
Since you did a lot of work on the A-24, I was curious to know what you thought of the construction workmanship? I've been doing a lot of work on Kevin Smith's A-24, and am amazed at all of the gaffs in workmanship I have found. For instance a whole row of rivets attached to nothing in the fuselage skin, smiley faces on the heads of others, poorly drilled holes, and worst of all, riveting where the bucking bar slipped, or was pulled away during riveting, leaving a large dent in the piece. It's caused quite a few headaches to fix!

Cheers,
Richard

[jcw]

RMA
The workmanship on ours was good but not great.. most of the problems we had delt with the modification to sprayer which was very poor and required a lot of work to fix. remember, that as the war started going and plants expanded rapidly to increase capacity and there were a lot of minimully trained folks building acft with one supervisor trying to keep it all together so a number of acft came out less than steller but then they didn't expect them to last more than a couple of years anyway. the one you are working on seems to be one that folks were learning on.. to bad for you all but it goes to show how overbuilt most acft were at that time..

take care

jcw