Can anyone help me solve the TFC P-47G Mystery?

Now that the TFC P-47G is at Duxford, I was hoping that someone here, either poster or lurker who works for TFC or has access to the aircraft could try and look at the data-plate for the P-47G and see if the construction number (c/n) is listed and it is 21962?

Sorry I do not know where it is located.. The reason is that I hope it can clear up a long term mystery re Curtiss c/ns..

If this particular subject bores you to death… but you stop here….

I have only been speculating on the P-47G c/n’s over the last couple of years.
No official c/n’s are known as yet and the only known 2 surviving P-47G’s had to my knowledge not previously revealed their secret.

The March issue of Air Britain news quoted the c/n of the TFC P-47G as having 21962. This was the first published record I had seen quoting this number.. However when I traced the source of this information back with Air Britain, no one could provide me with where the information came from… It has been lost in the mists of time.. G-INFO does NOT quote the C/N.

Anyway, here is an abridged version of the research…

Curtiss, C/N’s were essentially consecutive in number and a lot of work has been undertaken by researchers worldwide to establish what they all were… This is mostly a result of looking at data plates of surviving P-40s and C-46’s and archive documentation. However, the art is fitting in the P-40’s with the C-46s and all the other aircraft Curtiss built (such as prototypes and cancelled orders) into the c/n list…

However, and this is the “pure speculation” bit at the moment….. There is currently a ‘GAP’ that exists of 354 c/ns. This is interesting as there were 354 P-47G aircraft built! The gap is between some Curtiss P-40K-15-CU and C-46D-20-CU as shown below:

Provisional: 354 P-47G Thunderbolts??

Start End US Serial US Serial Note
c/n c/n Start End

21649 21813 42-10265 42-10429 P-40K-15-CU (Total 165)
21814 21833 42-24920 42-24939 Provisional P-47G-CU (Total 20)
21834 21873 42-24940 42-24979 Provisional P-47G-1-CU (Total 40)
21874 21933 42-24980 42-25039 Provisional P-47G-5-CU (Total 60)
21934 22013 42-25040 42-25119 Provisional P-47G-10-CU (Total 80)
22014 22167 42-25120 42-25273 Provisional P-47G-15-CU (Total 154)
22168 22367 44-78345 44-78544 C-46D-20-CU (Total 200)

So If you work out the maths, then you can make 42-25068 possibly (c/n 21962) – which is the c/n in the Air Britain news and it is the proof of this that I am after…..

As the aircraft has now turned up at TFC (after a long period of being out of sight in a shipping container), perhaps the data-plate can be traced (if it still exists) and the c/n confirmed?

As an aside there is no known hook yet into the P-40F (Merlin engined variant) c/ns and these are the biggest gap in our collective knowledge so any help here would be a bonus…

If you do not want to post the information, here can you PM me??

Regards and thanks in anticipation

Paul