Warbird Information Exchange

Yesterday I was reading an article about the FW-190 during lunch and got to wondering if any had been used post-war by anyone's air force. A quick "Googling" took me to Wikipedia where I found this:

"The Turkish Air Force retired all of its FW190 A-3 fleet at the end of 1947 mostly because of lack of spare parts and bilateral agreements which requires retiring and scrapping of all German origin aircraft. Nonetheless all of retired FW190s were saved from scrapping. The aircraft are wrapped with protective clothes and preserved under the soil near Aviation Supply and Maintenance Center at Kayseri city. Several attempts have been made to move these aircraft to museums, none of them have been successful as of now."

Is there any validity to this or is somebody dreaming?

Dan

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Defending Stearmans on WIX since Jeff started badmouthing them back in 2005.

The second one. I don't think Turkey is exotic enough for TIGHAR anyway.

Maybe they're buried next to the Spitfires in Burma.....

I think there's a good chance there are FW-190's to be found.Turkey probably lost several due to various mechanical reasons. Also, depending on the type of govt. they've had since 1945, there is also a decent chance that some remnants survive in some on-base junkyards at a few of their airbases. Last, is there a scrap industry in that country. IF not then they would have had far less value as scrap and maybe just left to rot. Think about the aircraft that have been found in Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq.
It would be interesting to know if the Turks recorded their aircraft losses and locations like other countries.

In 1948 Turkey began phasing out the Fw-190, a process completed in early 1949.
full article with photos of them in Turkish service here
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/201 ... h-service/

The article does not say what happened to them.

FWIW, about 20 years ago I was going through an industrial section of Istanbul, and saw several F-84F's in pieces in a storage yard, so who knows...

This story does the rounds every time someone 'discovers' that Turkey had Fw-190s. In the 1980s a good trawl of the yards/airfields was done for F-86E stuff (and I suspect at that time also some digging for non-existent F-86D/Ks which were reported sold/aid-supplied to the THK but never were) and I'm sure anything surviving would have been mopped-up then.

But of course one should never let the truth get in the way of a good 'buried aircraft' story! Especially when it's nigh-on impossible to prove that something doesn't exist...