When I photographed this Corsair at Wings Over Solano in April 2026, I did what I always do. I looked up the bureau number stenciled on the tail. Bureau number 17799. What came back was not what I expected.
This aircraft, the Vought F4U-1A Corsair owned by the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, is the oldest airworthy F4U Corsair in the world. It had returned to flight just seven months earlier, on September 23, 2025, following a two-year restoration, and was wearing a WWII tri-color scheme that puts it closer visually to its 1943 and 1944 combat configuration than at any point in recent memory. The day I put a lens on it at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, it had been back in the air for less than a year. The aircraft is eighty-two years old. Looking at it on the ramp in the California morning light, none of that is visible. It looks like it is about to go to war.
It was manufactured at Vought's plant in Stratford, Connecticut, under manufacturing number 3884. The Navy accepted it on August 31, 1943, and it was physically delivered on September 6. From Stratford it went to San Diego, and from San Diego it went to war.
In late 1943 and into 1944, bureau 17799 was in the Southwest Pacific as part of Operation Cartwheel, the Allied campaign to neutralize the massive Japanese base at Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Aircraft in that theater operated from a shared pool distributed among Marine fighter squadrons as the tempo of operations demanded, and records confirm 17799 passing through VMF-217 and indicate it likely served with VMF-213, VMF-214, VMF-215, VMF-216, and others operating in the same area. One of those squadrons was VMF-214, Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington's Black Sheep Squadron, which was flying in the same theater during the same period. The records do not confirm that Boyington or his pilots ever flew bureau 17799 specifically. The aircraft was in the pool. The Black Sheep were drawing from the pool. The connection is unproven, and it is honestly stated as such, but it is not impossible.
By the summer of 1944, bureau 17799 had been reassigned to VMF-441, the Blackjacks, operating from Roi-Namur at the northern tip of Kwajalein Atoll in the Central Pacific, part of Operation Flintlock. Two VMF-441 pilots have logbook entries confirming they flew 17799 in combat that summer. On June 10, 1944, Major John Tashjian flew it on a Combat Air Patrol over the task force below. On June 24 and again on July 3, Lieutenant Colonel Ferrill Purdy flew it on combat missions over the Marshall Islands. Neither man knew the other had flown the same aircraft. They would not discover it for 72 years. Their stories are told separately, because they deserve to be.
By August 1944, records show bureau 17799 had been rotated back to the continental United States and was at NAS San Diego undergoing overhaul. From there it passed through a succession of stateside squadrons and units. From December 1944 it was with VF-84 "Wolf Gang" in San Diego. In January 1945 it moved to VBF-14, a bombing-fighting squadron, at Naval Auxiliary Air Station Ream Field, now Naval Outlying Landing Field Imperial Beach. In February 1945 it transferred to VBF-98. Between April and June 1945 it served with CASU-33, a carrier aircraft service unit, at NAS Los Alamitos. That was its last assignment.
On August 31, 1945, exactly two years to the day after it was accepted into the Navy, bureau 17799 was stricken from the inventory and declared surplus. Two years of Pacific war compressed into a single symmetrical bookend.
Then it went to Hollywood and nearly didn't come back.
In approximately 1946, just months after being stricken from the Navy inventory, bureau 17799 was purchased by MGM Studios in Culver City, California as a prop for a WWII film that was apparently never made. MGM also acquired other surplus aircraft during this period, some used as props and some as wind generators, their propwash recruited to create the large volumes of artificial wind that film productions required. Bureau 17799 was moved to the studio backlot and left there. Its engine was removed. Its fabric wing and tail surfaces rotted away in the open air. For roughly 24 years it sat outside on that lot, a Pacific combat veteran deteriorating into a stripped and weather-beaten hulk behind a film studio that had other things to think about. In January 1970, when MGM's new owners began selling the studio's backlots for real estate development and liquidating surplus property along with them, aviation collector Edward T. Maloney found bureau 17799 in that condition and bought it. He was the founder of The Air Museum, then based in Ontario, California. He had the aircraft transported there and began the long work of figuring out what it would take to bring it back.
By 1973 the museum had relocated to its current home at Chino Airport, and in 1974 two childhood friends who were also mechanics and pilots at the museum, Steve Hinton and Jim Maloney, son of Ed Maloney, began gathering parts and working through the airframe in earnest. The restoration was not straightforward. The original Pratt and Whitney R-2800 engine configuration for the early model Corsair was not available, and the aircraft was rebuilt using an R-2800 with a single-stage supercharger sourced from a Douglas A-26 Invader bomber. The substitution made the restored aircraft approximately 700 pounds lighter than a stock F4U-1A, giving it a better rate of climb at low altitudes and a shorter takeoff roll than its wartime counterpart. The restoration was mechanically complete by 1975 to 1976. On June 8, 1977, bureau 17799 flew for the first time in more than thirty years.
The timing was fortuitous. The NBC television series Baa Baa Black Sheep, a fictionalized account of VMF-214's exploits under Pappy Boyington, was in production. The show needed flying Corsairs. Bureau 17799 was available, airworthy, and, in one of the more remarkable coincidences in warbird history, had almost certainly operated in the same theater as the squadron whose story it was now being recruited to tell. The production began with a pilot movie called Flying Misfits, and bureau 17799 appeared in it. Boyington himself served as an advisor to the production and made on-screen appearances. The series was later renamed Black Sheep Squadron for its second season, and bureau 17799 appeared in 11 of the 13 episodes. One of eight Corsairs used in the production, it debuted in the first episode of season two, "Divine Wind," which aired on December 14, 1977. The aircraft that may have flown alongside the real Black Sheep in 1943 was playing a fictional Black Sheep Corsair on network television thirty-four years later.
Its Hollywood career did not stop there. Bureau 17799 subsequently appeared in the television series Airwolf, an IMAX film called Space, and an ABC Wide World of Flying production. It was also said to have been an inspiration for the character of Skipper, the gruff Corsair veteran in the 2013 Disney animated film Planes, through its association with the Black Sheep Squadron story. In 2022 it appeared in Devotion, a Korean War film about Jesse Brown, the first African American naval aviator to die in combat, and Tom Hudner, the white pilot who deliberately crash-landed his own aircraft in a failed attempt to pull Brown from his downed Corsair on December 4, 1950, near the Chosin Reservoir. Brown died in the cockpit, trapped by the wreckage. His remains were never recovered from North Korea. Hudner received the Medal of Honor for the attempt. Bureau 17799 was one of at least five Corsairs used in filming. A second Corsair used in the production, bureau 133722 from the Erickson Aircraft Collection in Madras, Oregon, was painted to represent Jesse Brown's specific aircraft bearing the number 97231 and VF-32 markings. That aircraft is a tribute to Brown, not a relic. Brown's actual Corsair went down with him at the Chosin Reservoir and has never been recovered. Bureau 133722 still wears those Devotion tribute markings today. Bureau 17799, after a two-year restoration completed in September 2025, was repainted in a variation of the WWII tri-color scheme, dark blue, intermediate blue, and white, returning it to something closer to the configuration it wore during its actual combat service in 1943 and 1944, before either Hollywood or Korea entered its story.
Meanwhile a different kind of history was unfolding around the aircraft. In 2016, a children's book author in Columbia, Missouri named Michele Spry traced the serial numbers in a World War II pilot's logbook to bureau 17799 at Planes of Fame. That pilot was Ferrill Purdy. What Spry found when she submitted the documentation was that for the first time in the aircraft's history, the museum could connect it to a verified combat pilot. They then found a second one. John Tashjian, Purdy's wingman, had a logbook entry of his own from June 10, 1944. Both men were still alive.
In October 2016, Planes of Fame flew bureau 17799 from Chino to Columbia Regional Airport, where Purdy, then 94 and using a wheelchair, was waiting on the tarmac. More than 200 people had gathered. The Corsair landed, taxied toward him, and stopped a few feet away. Purdy reached out and tapped the belly of the plane ten times, a ritual he had performed before every combat flight 72 years earlier, then raised his hand in a salute. His daughter and son each took a flight in the aircraft that afternoon. Ferrill Purdy died in 2018.
On July 10, 2021, bureau 17799 carried John Tashjian aloft over Chino on his 100th birthday. A small seat had been fitted behind the cockpit in place of the armor plating to allow a passenger. Tashjian climbed in and said yeah when they asked if he wanted to go. The smile on his face when it landed did the talking for him. John Tashjian died on November 24, 2022. On February 17, 2023, Planes of Fame pilot Matt Nightingale flew bureau 17799 over Miramar National Cemetery during Tashjian's memorial service with a small urn of ashes placed on the instrument panel. Nightingale said afterward that he had been laughing the whole way. At a memorial that might have called for solemnity, that reaction was in fact the most fitting tribute possible. John Tashjian was, by every account of everyone who knew him, a man who was always smiling, always positive, always the same joyful presence he had been his entire life. Flying with his ashes in the aircraft he had loved, Nightingale felt exactly that. The laughter was not out of place. It was the sound of the right man being remembered the right way.
Shortly after the Tashjian memorial, bureau 17799 went into a two-year restoration at Chino. It returned to flight on September 23, 2025. Seven months later, in April 2026, I put a lens on it at Wings Over Solano and looked up the bureau number.
Some aircraft carry their history quietly. Bureau 17799 has been carrying it for over eighty years, and it is still adding to it.