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Pearl Harbor warplane made in N.Y. returning to U.S.

 
A Buffalo, N.Y.-built American P-40B Warhawk is one of the few remaining still-airworthy planes to survive Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack.
A Buffalo, N.Y.-built American P-40B Warhawk is one of the few remaining still-airworthy planes to survive Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack.
Published Dec. 7, 2013

ALBANY, N.Y. — An American fighter that's one of the few remaining still-airworthy planes to survive the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is being donated to an organization that flies World War II aircraft at living-history events across the United States.

Robert Collings, executive director of the Stow, Mass.-based Collings Foundation, said that the purchase of the Curtiss P-40B Warhawk from an aviation museum in England was completed this week. The plane will be disassembled and shipped to the United States, where it eventually will fly over Buffalo and other cities, with plans to participate in the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack in 2016, he said.

"The history that comes with it is pretty special," Collings said Friday, the day before the 72nd anniversary of the surprise attack in Hawaii that launched the United States into the Second World War. "It was obvious that we needed to get this airplane back to America."

Collings said a sponsor who wishes to remain anonymous bought the plane for several million dollars from the Fighter Collection in Duxford, England. He said the person who bought the warplane will donate it to the Collings Foundation, bringing its collection of World War II aircraft to a dozen, including a B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator, both bombers.

The Warhawk heading back to the United States came off the assembly line at the Curtiss Aircraft Co. plant in Buffalo in early 1941. Later that year, it was undergoing repairs in a hangar at Wheeler Field on Oahu when waves of Japanese warplanes attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. While more than 300 other U.S. planes were destroyed or damaged during the attack, the P-40B escaped unscathed.