Built at Inglewood, California, accepted by the Army Air Corps at Mines Field (now LAX) on April 3, 1943, and delivered to Ladd Army Airfield in Alaska on May 1, 1943. She had 43 total hours on the airframe when it ended.
On February 18, 1944, Second Lieutenant Edward W. Getter flew into heavy snow on a VFR flight plan near Summit, Alaska. He was killed. The aircraft remained on that mountain for over 30 years — exposed to decades of Alaskan weather, occasionally visited by hunters who scratched their names into the engine valve covers. Not exactly standard warbird provenance.
In 1977, Waldon 'Moon' Spillars recovered 43-6006 from a remote mountainous area of Alaska. With very few P-51A parts available anywhere in the world, the restoration required components from P-51Ds to complete. The Allison V-1710 engine was sourced and fitted — the engine that makes the P-51A sound completely different from every P-51D you have ever heard at an airshow. Polar Bear flew again in 1985 for the first time since the 1944 crash: 41 years later, carrying a story almost nobody knew.
She flew the West Coast airshow circuit for years. The Allison sound — sharper, higher, different from the Merlin growl — drew questions from everyone who heard it come down the flightline. The early-model P-51A is so rare that most people seeing one assume it is something else. That distinctiveness, and the Alaska mountain backstory, made her a conversation piece at every show she attended.
She has since been sold, fully restored to P-51A specifications, and repainted. The Polar Bear name and nose art are gone. She flies today as 'Shanty Irish.' Somewhere on a mountain in Alaska, hunters' names are still scratched into her original valve covers.