This is the place where the majority of the warbird (aircraft that have survived military service) discussions will take place. Specialized forums may be added in the new future
Sat Dec 19, 2020 12:17 pm
Sat Dec 19, 2020 3:09 pm
I moved to Boise in mid-1978 and the concrete pedestal was still in the park.
I happened upon some burned remnants of it at a local scrapyard...not much left but still identifiable as an Invader.
The scrap yard on the SE part of town (over by the locomotive factory) was filled with interesting stuff, a few WWII-era military vehicles (I was there looking for a M38A1 post-war Jeep , the military variant of the CJ-5).
Also at the yard was a more or less intact F-86L with lots of non-crash body damage. It may have had ID ANG markings, I'm not sure.
At that time the ANG was flying the RF-4C, but they had a F-102 on a stick alongside the freeway near the airport.
On Gowan field, a B-25 was slowly being disassembled, I have a slide somewhere of just its center section. According to Scott Thompson's book, B-25 in Civil Service, it has survived somewhere.
Back then, B-17s came to town during fire season and TBMs were plentiful in the area, there was a huge lot of them for sale in Lewiston... going for about $15,000 apiece. Some of my B-17 photos are in Thompson's Final Cut.
Sat Dec 19, 2020 6:40 pm
Two contemporary accounts; ironically the local papers had a lot of mentions of A-26s fighting forest fires in the area at that time:

- The_Times_News_Wed__Jul_5__1972_.jpg (57.07 KiB) Viewed 1159 times

- South_Idaho_Press_Thu__Jul_6__1972_.jpg (50.8 KiB) Viewed 1159 times
No photos, but newspapers.com doesn't seem to have any Boise papers.