When I photographed this Corsair at an airshow 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 now owned by the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, is the oldest airworthy F4U Corsair in the world. It rolled off the production line at Vought's Stratford, Connecticut plant and was accepted into the United States Navy on August 31, 1943. It has been flying, with one significant interruption, ever since.
The Navy put it to work immediately. In late 1943 and into 1944, bureau 17799 was operating in the Southwest Pacific as part of Operation Cartwheel, the Allied campaign to neutralize the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul. Aircraft in that theater were pooled and shared between Marine fighter squadrons as the tempo of operations demanded, and records show 17799 passing through several units including VMF-217 and likely others operating in the same area. One of those squadrons was VMF-214, Major Gregory "Pappy" Boyington's Black Sheep Squadron, which was operating in the same theater during the same period. The records do not confirm that Boyington or his pilots ever flew 17799 specifically, but they do not rule it out either. The aircraft was in the pool. The Black Sheep were drawing from the pool. The connection is unproven and honestly stated as such.
What is confirmed is that by the summer of 1944, bureau 17799 had been reassigned to VMF-441, the Blackjacks, in the Central Pacific, where the squadron was taking part in Operation Flintlock, the capture of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two VMF-441 pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Ferrill Purdy and Major John Tashjian, both have logbook entries confirming they flew 17799 in combat that summer. Their stories are told separately, because they deserve to be.
By August 1944 the aircraft had been rotated back to the continental United States for overhaul at NAS San Diego. It passed through several stateside squadrons and units over the following year. 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 disappeared into the civilian world and eventually into Hollywood.
By 1960 it had ended up at MGM Studios in Culver City, California, acquired as a movie prop for a film that was apparently never made. It sat outside the studio for the better part of a decade, exposed to the elements, deteriorating into a hulk. When aviation collector Edward T. Maloney found it in 1969 it was derelict, a Pacific combat veteran rotting in a parking lot behind a film studio. He acquired it in 1970 and brought it to The Air Museum in Ontario, California, which later became the Planes of Fame Air Museum at Chino Airport.
The restoration was undertaken by two childhood friends, Steve Hinton and Jim Maloney, son of Ed Maloney. They spent roughly two years gathering parts and working through the airframe, and in 1975 bureau 17799 flew again for the first time in thirty years. The timing turned out to be significant. The television series Baa Baa Black Sheep, a fictionalized account of VMF-214's exploits under Boyington, was going into 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. Pappy Boyington himself served as an advisor to the production and made occasional on-screen appearances. The aircraft that may have flown alongside the Black Sheep in 1943 was now playing a Black Sheep Corsair on network television in 1976.
Since restoration the aircraft has appeared in numerous airshows and productions including the movie Flying Misfits, the television series Airwolf, an IMAX film called Space, and an ABC Wide World of Flying special. It remains airworthy and active at Planes of Fame today.
Some aircraft carry their history quietly. Bureau 17799 has been carrying it for over eighty years.