And there was me thinking he said:

…there is now a big gap in the market for a quality preservation/historical magazine…I guess Warbirds Worldwide wouldn’t be such a bad yardstick to measure something new by after all.

Ah, Dick Boing’s aircraft!

I think you’re missing the point David. What do you do with the thing once you’ve recovered it? How many recovered airframes have simply fizzed away after recovery over the years? So you’re then into a costly conservation process. And what do you have at the end of it? A vaguely P-38-shaped piece of corroded metal, mildly interesting to a relatively small percentage of visitors to whichever museum it might end up in.

No it doesn’t, the early, unturbocharged P-38s were rejected as being unsuitable and saw no operational service.

I’m sure if the IWM tapped into their American Friends network for funding it would be do-able, so I can only assume they don’t consider it desirable. It has no relevance to the RAF Museum, who already have their hands full for the forseeable future with the Dornier and other ongoing projects. So the only viable customer for it would be from overseas. NMUSAF and NASM already have complete examples, so who else would be interested?

Warbirds Worldwide was in my opinion the best. I really wish someone would start that 1 up again.

Warbird Digest tried that format, but rapidly became ‘here’s the latest shiny P-51D out of Midwest Aero’, and has now gone subscription only. It remained very (VERY!) US-centric during the time I took it.

Would a museum from another country be seriously interested? In terms of conservation and restoration resources, most museums (even national collections) are considerably worse off than we are in the UK.

Indeed Mr K