Boguing, I think you’re overestimating the power of archive documents.

Historians have been trying to reconstruct the details of WWII air battles for half a century, but in order to do so, you have to actually have access to precise documents from both sides of the conflict, and that is rarely the case. Being interested mostly in Pacific and CBI theater of ops I read quite a bit on the subject and one thing stands out – in many cases crosschecking exact air victories / losses of both sides (especially from Philippines campaign onwards) is very difficult, because of lack of Japanese records, which were just lost before the end of the war, or destroyed soon after. Creating a big database or a “calendar” showing “which air force sent which aircraft into action and their losses/achievements etc.” is just impossible then.

Simple example: to this day, nobody knows for sure how many Zero fighters actually took part in an engagement over Bougainville, which ended admiral Yamamoto’s life. According to IJN, all six fighters providing cover landed undamaged at Kahili, while USAAF pilots were reporting hitting a couple of them – were there any additional Zeroes from Kahili operating in the area? Maybe – we’ll never know, because Japnese reports from that day do not exist anymore, while American ones are not precise (Mitchell’s pilots initially claimed downing three Bettys, which obviously was not true). And If such a “famous” interception (maybe the most famous of WWII?) has not been precisely reconstructed to this day, what can be said about hundreds of other, “ordinary” air battles?

Getting back to today’s warbirds database topic, I suppose it wouldn’t be easy either – do you remember that cool short documentary posted (linked to) somewhere here a couple weeks ago, the one about C-47s transporting people and goods all over Columbia? I enjoyed watching it and the thing that struck me was – nobody aboard the old plane knew how many flight hours it actually had done in its life so far, ’cause when they bought it, they only got a handful of papers with it. They just know it’s a surplus WWII machine and they obviously do all the required paperwork now, but there’s a “document hole” in the operational history of this particular A/C and nobody seems to be able (or willing) to fill it. I wonder how many similar cargo warbirds with “messy” or incomplete papers are still flying / rotting in the bushes in Latin and South America, Africa etc. Tracking them and their history must be hell.