Within 24 hours of Mike Wright arriving at Marana with the P-38, Del Smith ordered the plane to the paint stripping facility on base. The Air Center had a strip and paint area that could throw an army of people at a 747 and have it stripped, cleaned, primed, and re painted in less than 72 hours. They used to say 48 hour turn around on a 747 but I never saw one actually done that quickly. In any event, I was sitting in my office about three hours later when one of the guys walked in, I think it was Rick Barter, and said, hey, you better come down to the strip rack and look at the P-38. When I got down there I was pretty shocked. The crew had managed to tape, mask, and strip the plane in less than three hours. The paint stripper made short work of the paint and The high pressure water guns had dislodged dozens of dinner plate size 1/2" thick pieces of Bondo. I've never seen so much Bondo on a car, never mind on an airplane. As I walked under the left wing root, a small frisbee size piece of body shop mud fell off and hit me in the head, I still have it. We towed the plane back to the hangar to have a closer look. The more we looked, the more strange things we found. Don't get me wrong, it was not a complete junk pile, after all, Mike did fly it all the way to London and back but it was clear, a new paint job was not going to fix all the problems. Both engines were using about as much oil as they were 100LL per hour so I decided to call Del and explain the situation. As I expected, I got the blame for buying the plane, even though he had purchased it three weeks before I joined the company.
I found the video of the day Mike arrived in the plane just last week. Maybe I'll try to post some of it.
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