What Happened To The P-51 Mustang After WW2 ?

On the afternoon of September 5th, 1949, more than 72,000 spectators at Cleveland Municipal Airport watched a radically modified P-51 Mustang named Begin tear around the course at over 400 mph. The pilot, Bill ODM, was leading the Thompson Trophy race. He had never flown a pylon race before that weekend. Odum was a famous aviator. He held records for long-distance flights, including a round the world journey completed in just 73 hours and 5 minutes. Jackie Cochran, the legendary aviatrix who held more speed and altitude records than any woman alive, had bought begin specifically for him to race.

The aircraft was beautiful. Its radiator had been moved from the belly to the wing tips. The lower fuselage had been fared over smooth. It looked less like a war plane and more like a racing machine built for pure speed.

On the second lap, something went wrong. Odum cut inside pylon number three and tried to correct toward pylon 4. The Mustang rolled inverted. It flew upside down for a terrible moment. Then it plunged into a house on West Street in nearby Berea, Ohio. Odum died instantly. So did Gene Leair and her 13-month-old son Craig. The family had moved into that house just 4 days earlier. The house burned. 72,000 people watched in horror.

Cook Cleland flying a Goodyear F2G Super Corsair won the race after Odum's crash. When reporters asked him about the tragedy, Cleland was blunt. He said Odum should never have been in the Thompson Trophy race at all. He was a Bendix pilot, a cross-country pilot. Pylon Racing took a different temperament. ODM was a good pilot, but he was in the wrong race. That crash would end the golden age of Cleveland Air racing and force the Mustang into the shadows for more than a decade, but it would not kill the airplane.

The P-51 Mustang, the fighter that had swept the Luftvafer from the skies over Europe, was about to begin a second life that nobody could have predicted. It would fight in Korea. It would fly for more than 30 nations across six continents. It would cut telephone wires with its propeller over the Sinai Desert. It would see the last dog fight between piston-powered aircraft in history. And four decades after the factories closed, it would still be flying combat missions in the Caribbean while my Gjet circled overhead. This is the story of what happened to the P-51 Mustang after World War II.

When the war ended in August 1945, the United States military found itself with a problem nobody had anticipated. There were too many airplanes. North American Aviation had built over 15,000 Mustangs during the war. The factory in Englewood, California, had produced them at a pace of over a 100 per week during peak production. Now the assembly lines went silent. Thousands of aircraft sat in storage depots across three continents. The cost to maintain them exceeded the value of keeping them. The solution was brutal. Across America and Europe, crews began cutting up perfectly good fighters with acetylene torches and dropping 18 ft steel plates from cranes to smash airframes in half.

A teenager named Ed Maloney watched this destruction unfold at Calero Field near Chino, California. He was a senior in high school with a deep love for aviation. He had spent his childhood clipping pictures of airplanes and building detailed wooden models while other kids traded baseball cards. Now he watched B17s and B-24s snapped like toys. The steel plates fell from cranes and cleaved the fuselages in two. It was almost sickening, he said. Later, he saw house-sized mounds of aircraft technical manuals being set ablaze. One of the workers told him he was welcome to all he could carry. Maloney made trip after trip, loading his car with documents, saving them from the flames. That experience would haunt him for the rest of his life. He vowed to save as many aircraft as possible. He did not have much money at the time, but he would scrape together enough to buy an old warbird and store it. Sometimes he would trade one aircraft for something else. Soon he had a collection, but Maloney was the exception. Most Americans saw surplus aircraft as scrap metal. War-weary P-51 Mustangs sold at auction for as little as $1,500. That was less than the price of a new car. During the war, each Mustang had cost the government about $51,000. Now they were being sold for pennies on the dollar.

Some foreign governments got them even cheaper. Under the Interamerican Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed in Rio de Janeiro in September 1947. Many hundreds of Mustangs were transferred for the nominal price of $1 each. The Swiss Air Force bought 130 Mustangs from surplus stocks in southern Germany for about $4,000 a piece in December 1947. Switzerland would fly those Mustangs until 1958, replacing their pre-war messes with American fighters at bargain prices. The military saw no future for the propeller fighter. Jet aircraft were the future. The Loheed P80 Shooting Star had flown in 1944 and could outrun any piston engine plane in level flight. The new air forces forming around the world wanted jets. The Mustang seemed destined for the scrapyard.

Then came Korea. North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th, 1950. Within days, the Korean People's Army had pushed south across the 38th parallel with Soviet-built tanks and overwhelming numbers. The South Korean military collapsed. American forces stationed in Japan scrambled to respond. Commanders discovered a serious problem almost immediately. Their jets were fast, but they could not stay over the battlefield long enough to support ground troops. The F80 Shooting Star burned fuel so quickly that pilots barely had time to identify targets before turning back to base. The round trip from Japan to Korea consumed most of their fuel. They arrived over the battlefield with only minutes of loiter time. Worse, the early jets required long, paved runways. Most Korean airfields were short, rough, and cratered by artillery. Jet engines ingested debris and flamed out. The sleek new fighters were useless at the forward bases where ground forces needed them most.

The Mustang had none of these problems. It could loiter over the battlefield for hours. It could operate from dirt strips that would destroy a jet engine. It could carry a,000 lb of bombs or rockets or napalm. And there were hundreds of them sitting in storage across the United States, waiting for the cutting torch. The Air Force scrambled to pull mustangs out of mothballs. Many had been relegated to Air National Guard units. Others sat in desert storage at bases across the American Southwest. Crews worked around the clock to make them airworthy again. They loaded 145 Mustangs onto the aircraft carrier USS Boxer and shipped them across the Pacific. The Boxer departed Alameda, California on July 14th and arrived at Yokosuka, Japan just 8 days and 7 hours later. It was the fastest Trans-Pacific crossing by an aircraft carrier in history.

By late July, F-51 Mustangs were back in combat. The designation had changed. In June 1948, the new United States Air Force had replaced the P for pursuit with F for fighter across all its aircraft. The P-51 became the F-51, but under the new name, it was the same airplane. The warbird that had escorted bombers over Berlin was now diving on North Korean tanks. Lieutenant E. Helith was a young American pilot with barely 200 hours of Mustang flight time when he found himself flying with the Republic of Korea Air Force in those desperate first weeks. He was part of a small group of American volunteer pilots serving as advisers and combat leaders for the ROKAF. On July 10th, 1950, Helith was flying a mission toward Shonen when he realized his radio had failed. At the same moment, he spotted two North Korean tanks on a road below. He tried to alert the other pilots in his flight, but without a radio, they could not hear him. Elsath made a decision. He broke from the formation, dove, and attacked one of the tanks. He destroyed it. Then, following the road south, he found nine trucks and a half-track. He shot those up, too. When he finally landed, his aircraft was nearly out of ammunition. After the mission, he barely landed at Haidong and spent 5 days walking and hitchhiking back to Taegu.

That was the kind of war the Mustang would fight in Korea. Close support, interdiction, ground attack. The romantic era of high-altitude dog fighting was over. The Mustang pilots were no longer hunting other fighters. They were killing tanks and trucks and supply convoys. This was brutal low-level work, and it came with a terrible cost. The Mustang's liquid-cooled Merlin engine was its Achilles' heel. Unlike an air-cooled radial engine, which could absorb significant damage and keep running, the Merlin depended on a radiator filled with coolant. A single rifle bullet through that radiator meant the engine would overheat and seize within minutes. There was no gliding to safety. Pilots had seconds to bail out or die.

Ed Schmood, the brilliant engineer who had led the Mustang's design team at North American Aviation, watched in frustration from California. He said later that the P-51 was a high-altitude fighter. It had been designed to escort bombers at 25,000 ft where its supercharged Merlin engine could outperform anything in the sky. He said that flying it in ground support was almost a suicide mission because a 30 caliber bullet could rip a hole in the radiator and the engine would freeze up in 2 minutes. But the Air Force had made a catastrophic decision after World War II. They had scrapped their P47 Thunderbolts. The Thunderbolt was heavier and slower than the Mustang, but it had an air-cooled radial engine that could take tremendous punishment. It was the perfect ground attack aircraft. The Navy had kept its F4U Corsairs for similar reasons. The Mustang was what the Air Force had, so the Mustang went to war.

The statistics tell the story. 335 F-51 Mustangs were lost in Korea during the war. 264 pilots were killed or went missing. Of those losses, 172 fell to enemy ground fire. Just 10 were shot down by enemy jet fighters. The rest died in accidents or went missing without explanation. The vulnerability was worst in winter. Korean winters brought brutal cold and frequent icing conditions. The Mustangs were not equipped with de-icing systems. Wing ice accumulated rapidly at low altitudes, and an overloaded aircraft that entered a stall or spin almost never recovered. It was a virtual death sentence. On the ground, conditions were equally miserable. Shelter at forward bases was primitive. Pilots and mechanics lived in tents and unheated buildings. The brutal cold drove some airmen to rig improvised heating systems using oil and 100 octane aviation fuel. The results were predictable. Fires and explosions killed men who had survived combat.

Yet, the Mustang performed its mission. It could reach targets the jets could not. It could stay on station when the jets had to leave. It could operate from forward bases that the jets would never touch. North Korean troops learned to fear the sound of that Merlin engine. They feared napalm most of all. Pilots from the 51st Fighter Interceptor Squadron developed a hybrid napalm mixture with thermite that burned hot enough to melt the rubber right off tank road wheels. The punishing attacks forced North Korean forces to restrict troop movements to nighttime and to camouflage everything. Soldiers hid their vehicles under any available cover, sometimes driving tanks into houses or haystacks to escape the Mustangs circling overhead.

The Royal Australian Air Force's number 77 squadron flew Mustangs in Korea from July 1950 through April 1951 when they converted to Gloucester Meteor jets. They suffered significant casualties during that period before assisting other United Nations forces in hammering North Korean forces around Busan. The Australian Mustangs escorted American B29 bombers on raids against enemy airfields. The South African Air Force's number two squadron flew Mustangs from November 1950 until they converted to F86 Sabers. Their losses were heavy, 12 pilots killed in action, 30 missing. The South Africans flew as part of the United States 18th Fighter Bomber Wing and earned a reputation for professionalism under fire. The South Koreans flew Mustangs throughout the war. For them, it was not a matter of choice. They could not afford jets. The Mustang was their backbone fighter flown by pilots who were fighting for the survival of their country. Some Korean pilots were veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Air Services during World War II. They knew how to fly. They knew how to fight. They knew they might not come home.

By 1953, the Mustang was finally being replaced by jet fighter bombers. The F84 Thunderjet and the F86 Saber took over ground attack duties. The last American F-51s passed to the South Korean Air Force in January of that year. The age of the propeller fighter in American service was ending. The last American Air Force Mustang, an F-51D assigned to the West Virginia Air National Guard's 167th Fighter Bomber Squadron, was finally withdrawn from service on January 27th, 1957. It was retired to what was then called the Air Force Central Museum. But for a brief moment on May 6th, 1957, it was reactivated to fly at the 50th anniversary of the Air Force aerial firepower demonstration at Eglund Air Force Base in Florida. One final flight for the Old Warrior.

But in other parts of the world, the Mustang was just getting started. In the summer of 1948, a fledgling nation called Israel was fighting for its survival. The British mandate of Palestine had ended in May. The state of Israel had declared independence. Within hours, armies from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded. The new country had almost no air force. Its enemies flew Spitfires and Hurricanes, aircraft supplied by Britain. Israel had a hodgepodge collection of light civilian aircraft converted for military use and a handful of Czechoslovak-built Messerschmitts that were barely airworthy. Israeli agents in the United States went looking for fighters. They found four P-51 Mustangs for sale. The problem was that America had imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East. President Harry Truman supported humanitarian aid to Israel, but had blocked weapons sales. Exporting military aircraft was illegal. Al Schwmer, a New York-born flight engineer who would later found Israel Aerospace Industries, coordinated the purchase. The Israelis did something creative. They created the Mustangs and labeled them as combines manufactured by International. Nobody asked what kind of farm equipment weighed three tons and came in airplane-shaped crates.

The first two Mustangs arrived in September 1948. Mechanics worked around the clock to assemble them at a makeshift airstrip hidden among orange orchards near Herzliya. Within days, the Mustangs were flying combat missions. They immediately became the best fighters in the Israeli inventory, faster and longer-ranged than anything the Arab armies could put in the sky. With their long range spanning the entire Middle East, the Mustangs were used for reconnaissance as well as ground attack and interception. They could reach Damascus and Cairo and returned to base on a single tank of fuel. No other Israeli fighter could match that capability. On November 20th, 1948, a Royal Air Force De Havilland Mosquito was conducting reconnaissance over Israel. British aircraft had been flying these missions with impunity because no Israeli fighter could reach their altitude. Earlier interception attempts had failed. That day, American volunteer pilot Wayne Peak scrambled in a Mustang from Castina Air Base. He climbed to altitude and intercepted the Mosquito. He shot it down. It was a message. The skies over Israel now belonged to Israel. On January 5th, 1949, 2 days before the final ceasefire of the War of Independence, two Mustangs were escorting T6 Harvard trainers pressed into service as ground attack aircraft. They encountered Egyptian fighters over the battlefield. In the dogfight that followed, the Mustangs shot down three of them. It was the Mustangs' last air combat action of that war.

Although the War of Independence ended in early 1949, the Mustangs continued to fly. Israeli pilots conducted reconnaissance missions over neighboring Arab states for years afterward. In April 1951, four Mustangs and four Spitfires attacked Syrian positions at Al Hama after Syrian forces ambushed and killed seven Israeli soldiers. In April 1954, when an Israeli Navy ship ran aground near Saudi Arabia, Mustangs flew cover for the rescue operation. When recovery became impossible, they bombed the ship to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. By the mid-50s, the Israeli Air Force was acquiring jet fighters. Gloster Meteors came first, then Dassault Ouragans and Mystères from France. The Mustang lost its frontline role. Many were placed in storage. Only one squadron, number 116, remained operational, its primary mission was training new pilots.

Then came October 1956 and the Suez crisis. Israel, France, and Britain had secretly agreed to attack Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The plan called for Israel to strike first, providing Britain and France with a pretext to intervene. The Israelis pulled their Mustangs out of storage. A second squadron was formed. Given their long range, the Mustangs were tasked with destroying Egyptian aircraft at distant airfields, some beyond the Suez Canal in mainland Africa. But the Mustangs also received a special mission unlike anything the aircraft had ever attempted.

On October 29th, at approximately 3:00 in the afternoon, two pairs of P-51 Mustangs raced westward across the Sinai Desert. They flew at treetop level, so low that their propellers nearly touched the sand. Their mission was to cut Egyptian telephone lines using their wings. Israeli intelligence knew that Egyptian command and control depended on landlines running through the desert. If those lines went down, Egyptian units would be unable to coordinate their defense. Radio communication was unreliable. The telephone system was the nervous system of the Egyptian army. Someone had designed a special device for the mission. It consisted of a weight connected by a cable to the aircraft's tail. The idea was to drag the weight through the telephone wires, snagging and severing them. But during the mission, some of the devices fell off. The pilots did not abort. Instead, they flew even lower and used their wings and propeller blades to slice through the wires directly. It was an act of almost suicidal bravery. At that altitude, measured in feet rather than hundreds of feet. A single mistake meant instant death. The pilots succeeded. Egyptian communications across the Sinai were severed just as Israeli paratroopers dropped at the Mitla Pass. Egyptian commanders suddenly found themselves unable to contact their forward units. The resulting confusion contributed to the rapid Israeli advance. The Mustang had found yet another use. It was no longer just a fighter or a bomber. Now it was a wire cutter. Israel kept its Mustangs in service until January 15th, 1961. By then, jets had completely taken over the frontline role. But the Mustang had proven itself adaptable beyond anyone's imagination.

While the Mustang was fighting wars in Asia and the Middle East, it was finding a different kind of life in America. After the war, surplus Mustangs attracted a new breed of pilot. Men who had flown them in combat wanted to fly them again, but now for sport. Air racing had existed before the war. The Thompson Trophy race at Cleveland had drawn crowds of over a 100,000 during the Great Depression. But those pre-war races used specially built aircraft, tiny machines designed for nothing but speed. After 1945, the races opened to military surplus. Suddenly, ordinary civilians could buy fighters that had cost the government $50,000 for less than the price of a used car. The Mustang was perfect for racing. It was fast in a straight line. It was relatively easy to fly compared to more temperamental fighters like the Corsair, and it could be modified extensively. Racers stripped off armor and armament to save weight. They smoothed the airframe and filled every rivet hole. They tweaked the Merlin engines for more power. Some moved the radiator from the belly to the wing tips to reduce drag. Paul Mance won the Bendix Trophy cross-country race in 1946, flying a Mustang at 435 mph. Jackie Cochran finished second in another Mustang at 420 mph. In 1948, Muntz won again and Cochran finished third. The first three finishers that year were separated by less than 3 mph. It was the closest transcontinental race ever.

The Thompson Trophy pylon races at Cleveland showcased modified Mustangs flying at speeds their designers had never imagined. Modified Corsairs and Mustangs circled the course at over 400 mph, pulling tremendous G forces in the turns. But air racing was dangerous. In 1947, Tony Janazo died when carbon monoxide leaked into the cockpit of his modified Corsair during the Thompson Trophy race. His aircraft crashed while the race continued around him. Cook Cleland won that year at a record 396 mph. Then came September 5th, 1949 and Bill ODM's fatal crash. The deaths of Odum and the Le family ended the Cleveland races. Organizers could not risk another disaster in a residential neighborhood. The Civil Aeronautics Administration threatened to ban future races. Sponsors pulled out. From 1950 onward, surplus military aircraft were banned from competition. The Mustang racers were grounded. The airplanes that had dominated the postwar racing scene sat in hangers and on tie-down lines, waiting for something that might never come. They would not fly competitively again for 15 years.

In 1964, a boat racing champion named Bill Steed decided to revive air racing in the Nevada desert near Reno. Steed was a showman and a businessman. He secured a contract with ABC television's Wide World of Sports. He convinced casino owners in nearby Reno that air races would attract tourists. He found a small airport called Sky Ranch on a plateau about 5,000 ft above sea level, surrounded by mountains and far from any residential neighborhoods. The Mustangs came out of storage. Pilots who had kept their warbirds alive through the lean years suddenly had a reason to fly them again. A new generation of young pilots, too young to have fought in the war, discovered the thrill of racing aircraft their fathers had flown into combat. Modified Mustangs with names like Straga, Voodoo, and Red became legends of Reno. They regularly exceeded 450 mph, faster than the aircraft had ever flown during the war. The Reno races became the premier air racing event in the world, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators every September. The racing circuit continues to this day. Mustangs remain among the most competitive aircraft in the unlimited class. The competition has pushed modification beyond anything the original designers imagined. Racing Mustangs run engines producing over 3,000 horsepower, nearly double the wartime rating. Some have clipped wings for better roll rate. Others have stretched fuselages and modified cooling systems. Some of these machines have been flying for 80 years. They have outlived their designers, their original pilots, and most of the nations they once served. Every year at Reno, they prove that the Mustang's performance envelope has not yet been fully explored.

But the racing circuit was only part of the story. In the 1950s and 60s, the P-51 remained a frontline fighter in dozens of air forces around the world. The Philippines acquired over a 100 Mustangs after World War II. They became the backbone of the postwar Philippine Army Air Corps and later the Philippine Air Force. Filipino pilots flew Mustangs against communist Huk insurgents during the emergency of the late 40s and early 50s. They also used them against Moro rebels in southern Philippines. The Mustang was the first aircraft of the Philippine Air Demonstration Team formed in 1953 and named the Blue Diamonds. The following year, Indonesia acquired Mustangs from the departing Netherlands East Indies Air Force in 1949 and 50. Later they received more from the United States. Indonesian Mustangs flew against numerous rebellions during the 50s including the CIA-backed Permesta rebels in 1958. On May 18th, 1958, an Indonesian Mustang scored what remains the only confirmed aerial victory in the history of the Indonesian Air Force. Captain Ignatius Dwanto was flying a P-51D when he encountered a B-26 Invader over the Maluku Islands near Ambon. The Invader was being flown by Alan Lawrence Pope, an American CIA contract pilot supporting the Permesta Rebellion. Dwanto shot him down. Pope survived, was captured, sentenced to death, and eventually released in 1962. Guatemala operated 30 Mustangs from 1954 into the early 1970s. Haiti had four Mustangs during the rule of President Paul Eugene Magloire from 1950 to 1956. The last Haitian Mustangs were retired in 1973 or 74 and sold for spare parts. Sweden operated over 160 Mustangs designated J26. Some were modified for photo reconnaissance and designated S26. These aircraft participated in secret Swedish mapping missions of Soviet military installations along the Baltic coast in 1946 and 47. The operation codenamed Fallon involved deliberate violations of Soviet airspace. The Mustang could outdive any Soviet fighter of that era, so none were lost during these missions. The Chinese Nationalist Air Force flew Mustangs against the communists during the Chinese Civil War. When the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, their Mustangs went with them. The Communist Chinese captured 39 Mustangs left behind on the mainland. In October 1949, nine of those Mustangs flew in the military parade celebrating the founding of the People's Republic of China. Mao watched American-built fighters fly overhead in communist markings.

But the most remarkable Mustang operator was the Dominican Republic. The Fuerza Aérea Dominicana received its first Mustangs on September 29th, 1948. The initial aircraft were flown by Brazilian mercenaries, veterans of World War II, who trained over a 100 Dominican pilots between 1948 and 1950. Over the next few years, the Dominicans acquired more Mustangs, including 32X Swedish F-51Ds. Purchased in 1952 and 53. These Mustangs formed the backbone of Dominican Air Power for over three decades. They were among the most colorfully painted fighters in the world with bright schemes and sharkmouth nose art that made them look like aerial predators. Dominican Mustangs saw action during the Constanza invasion of 1959 when exiles attempted to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship. They flew again during the April Revolution of 1965 when civil war erupted and American forces intervened. During Operation Power Pack, the American intervention in the Dominican Republic, a Mustang was shot down. It was the last Mustang ever destroyed in battle, but the Dominicans kept flying them. When their De Havilland Vampire jets wore out in the 1970s and were not replaced, the Mustangs became the only armed fighters in the Dominican inventory. The colorful paint schemes gave way to camouflage. The shark mouths remained. In 1983, a Cuban intelligence ship refused to leave Dominican waters despite repeated warnings. The Dominican Air Force responded with its Mustangs. They strafed the ship until it departed. Cuba retaliated by sending MiG21 jets to buzz Dominican air bases. The Mustang pilots knew better than to fight supersonic jets with propeller fighters. As one pilot later recalled, "They went inside and hid until the Migs went away." The humiliation convinced the Dominican government to request American assistance. The United States eventually provided 37 Dragonfly attack jets. The Dragonflies would take over the ground attack and counterinsurgency role. The Dominican Mustangs were finally retired in 1984, 40 years after the aircraft's operational debut. Nine of the surviving aircraft were sold back to American collectors. They had outlasted every other Mustang operator in the world.

But before the Dominicans retired their Mustangs, the aircraft had one more war to fight. July 1969, the United States was about to land men on the moon. In Vietnam, American jets fought Soviet-designed MiGs at supersonic speeds. Phantoms and MiG21s dueled over the jungle with radar-guided missiles. The propeller fighter seemed like ancient history. But in Central America, a different kind of war was brewing. El Salvador and Honduras had been in conflict for years over land rights and immigration. El Salvador was small and densely populated. Honduras was larger but sparsely settled. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans had migrated to Honduras, seeking work on banana plantations and farmland. Honduran land reforms in the 1960s displaced many of these immigrants and sent them back to El Salvador, creating tensions that simmered for years. The fuse was lit during the 1970 World Cup qualifying series. El Salvador and Honduras were in the same group. The matches played in June 1969 triggered riots in both countries. Fans fought in the stands. Violence spilled into the streets. After El Salvador won the deciding match 3-2 on June 26th, El Salvador severed diplomatic relations with Honduras. On July 14th, 1969, El Salvador invaded Honduras.

Both nations fielded air forces from another era. Honduras flew F4U Corsairs, the bent-wing Navy fighters of World War II. They had about 17 Corsairs in their inventory, a mix of F4U4s and F4U5s. El Salvador had Corsairs of their own, Goodyear-built FG1Ds, plus a small force of Cavalier Mustang IIs. The Cavalier Mustangs were interesting aircraft. They were modernized P-51Ds, upgraded by the Cavalier Aircraft Corporation in Florida with improved engines, new avionics, and wingtip fuel tanks for extended range. El Salvador had purchased five of them, plus one dual-control trainer just the year before. The war that followed was the last conflict in which piston-engine aircraft fought each other in aerial combat. The opening attack was almost comical. A Salvadoran C47 transport, never designed as a bomber, flew over the Honduran air base at Toncontin on the evening of July 14th. Crewmen rolled 100-pound bombs out the cargo door by hand, trying to destroy Honduran aircraft parked in the open. They missed everything, but the fighting quickly became serious. Both air forces flew ground attack missions against each other's troops and infrastructure. Mustangs and Corsairs strafed and bombed with rockets, napalm, and machine gun fire.

On July 17th, 1969, Captain Fernando Soto of the Honduran Air Force took off on his fourth mission of the day. He was flying an F4U5 Corsair armed with 20 mm cannons. His mission was ground attack, supporting Honduran troops fighting off the Salvadoran invasion. As Soto and his two wingmen approached the combat zone, he ordered a weapons check. One of his wingmen, Captain Zepeda, reported that his cannons had jammed. Soto ordered Zepeda to return to base. Zepeda turned for home. But as he flew alone, two Salvadoran Cavalier Mustangs spotted him. They dove to attack. Zepeda found himself fighting for his life. The Mustangs were flown by Captains Douglas Varela and Leonel Lovo. They could not believe their luck. A single Honduran Corsair, apparently defenseless, right in front of them. Varela lined up for a kill shot. Zepeda threw his aircraft into a desperate evasive maneuver. Varela fired his 50 caliber machine guns. He missed. Zepeda kept evading, screaming for help on the radio. Soto heard him. He and his remaining wingman, Captain Acosta, jettisoned their bombs and dove to the rescue. Varela was concentrating on Zepeda, trying to line up another shot, when Soto came down behind him. Soto opened fire with his 20 mm cannons. The shells tore into the Mustang. Varela's aircraft went down. The second Mustang pilot, Lovo, tried to escape. Soto chased him down and destroyed him, too. Two kills in minutes. But Soto was not finished. After the dogfight, Soto and Acosta continued toward their original target area. They spotted two Salvadoran FG1D Corsairs returning from a mission. Soto engaged. He shot down both of them. Fernando Soto scored three confirmed aerial victories that day. One Mustang and two Corsairs. They were the last kills ever made in combat between propeller-driven fighters. His aircraft, F4U5 number 609, is preserved today at the Honduras Air Museum with three kill markings painted beneath the cockpit. The war ended the next day with a ceasefire brokered by the Organization of American States. Over 3,000 people died in those 100 hours. Tens of thousands more were displaced. But the conflict earned a place in aviation history. Corsairs against Mustangs, propeller against propeller. The aerial battles of World War II, replayed one last time over the jungles of Central America, 24 years after the Great War had ended.

After 1969, the combat career of the P-51 Mustang was finally over. But the aircraft refused to die. Remember Ed Maloney, the teenager who had watched Mustangs being cut up at Calero Field in 1945? He never forgot his vow to save aircraft. While he worked odd jobs and scraped together money, he kept buying old warbirds one at a time. Sometimes he traded one aircraft for something rarer or more historically significant. On January 12th, 1957, Maloney opened his collection to the public. It was the first aviation museum west of the Rockies. He displayed his aircraft wherever he could find space, moving several times over the years. In 1970, Maloney partnered with a car collector named Jim Brooker to display aircraft alongside classic automobiles at an attraction called Movie World Cars of the Stars and Planes of Fame in Buena Park, California. The venture was short-lived, but the name Planes of Fame stuck. By 1973, Maloney had secured a permanent home at Chino Airport. It was the same location where he had watched the destruction almost 30 years earlier. The field where Calero had operated was now surrounded by civilian aviation. Volunteers flocked to help restore the aircraft to flying condition. Maloney was not alone. Across America, former pilots and mechanics were rescuing Mustangs from junkyards, foreign air forces, and storage fields. They tracked down aircraft in Guatemala and Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. They rebuilt wrecks from crash sites around the world. They learned to maintain Merlin engines that Rolls-Royce had stopped producing decades earlier. The warbird movement grew into a global phenomenon. Restoration shops specializing in World War II aircraft opened across the United States and in Britain and Australia and New Zealand. Parts suppliers tracked down original components and manufactured new ones to original specifications. In the 1960s, a restored flyable Mustang might sell for $30,000. By the 1980s, that figure had climbed to over $100,000. Today, an airworthy P-51 commands prices between $2 and $4 million. Historic examples with documented combat records have sold for more than $5 million. There are now more than 160 airworthy Mustangs worldwide with over 200 in the United States on the FAA registry. Most of them still fly. They appear at air shows from Oshkosh, Wisconsin to Wanaka, New Zealand. They race at Reno. They star in films. Tom Cruise owns one and flies it himself. His Mustang appeared in Top Gun Maverick in 2022. These aircraft carry the names of the men who flew them in combat. Names like "Kryp's Mighty" and "Sierra Sue 2" and "Mano War." The paint schemes reproduce the markings of fighter groups that existed eight decades ago. The checker tail clan of the Tuskegee Airmen. The red-nosed Mustangs of the Fourth Fighter Group. The blue-striped aircraft of the 357th. Inside the cockpits, restorers have reinstalled armor plating and decommissioned machine guns. Some have functional World War II-era radios alongside modern avionics. The goal is authenticity to preserve not just the machine but the history it represents.

In 2014, a Mustang named Sierra Sue 2 completed a three-year restoration by Aero-Avia Aviation in Minnesota. The restoration team confirmed that nearly every component on the aircraft was original to its 1944 construction at the North American factory in Englewood, California. Only the engine mounts, ailerons, and flaps had been replaced. It is considered the most original P-51D Mustang still flying. Sierra Sue 2 had served in the European theater with the 4002nd Fighter Squadron during the final months of the war. After 1945, it was sold to Sweden, then to Nicaragua, then passed through civilian hands in America. Its restoration recreated the aircraft exactly as it appeared in April 1945. The aircraft earned the Reserve Grand Champion World War II award and a Golden Wrench award at the 2015 EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh. In May 2013, a pilot named Doug Matthews set a world altitude record for piston-engine aircraft in a Mustang named The Rebel. He climbed to 42,568 ft over Lake Okeechobee in Florida. The aircraft was nearly 70 years old. It performed flawlessly. That record still stands today.

Ed Maloney died on August 19th, 2016. It was National Aviation Day, established in 1939 to honor the birthday of Orville Wright. Maloney had spent his entire adult life saving warbirds from destruction. His museum now holds more than 50 aircraft, many of them in flying condition. His sons and the children of his friends continue his work. His son-in-law, Steve Hinton, became one of the most celebrated warbird pilots in the world. Steve's son, Steven Hinton Jr., is a seven-time Reno Air Races unlimited gold champion. The legacy continues.

The P-51 Mustang was designed in 102 days to meet an urgent British request in early 1940. The British Purchasing Commission had asked North American Aviation to build Curtis P40 fighters under license. North American's president, Dutch Kindelberger, offered to design something better instead. The prototype flew in October 1940. It was supposed to be a stopgap until better fighters could be developed. Instead, it became the defining American fighter of World War II. The early Allison engine versions performed poorly at high altitude. But when British engineers fitted a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into a Mustang airframe, the aircraft was transformed. The Merlin-powered Mustang could fly higher, faster, and farther than any other American fighter. By late 1943, Mustangs were escorting bombers all the way to Berlin and back. They destroyed nearly 5,000 enemy aircraft in the air over Europe. They destroyed thousands more on the ground. They escorted B-29 bombers to Tokyo in the final months of the Pacific War.

After the fighting stopped, the Mustang reinvented itself again and again. Ground attack aircraft in Korea. Wire cutter in the Sinai. Counterinsurgency fighter in the Philippines and Indonesia and Central America. Pylon racer over the Nevada desert. Flying museum piece for generations that never knew the war. Machines are not supposed to outlive their purpose by eight decades. But the Mustang has. It flies today because people refuse to let it die. Preservationists like Ed Maloney who rescued airframes from the scrapyard. Pilots who flew their obsolete fighters into combat one last time. Restorers who spend years rebuilding wrecks into award-winning aircraft. Collectors who invest millions to keep Merlin engines turning. The factory in Englewood closed long ago. The last new Mustang rolled off the line in 1945, but the sound of that engine, the howl of 12 cylinders at full power, still fills the sky over air shows from California to New Zealand. That is what happened to the P-51 Mustang after World War II. It became something more than an airplane. It became a symbol of an era that refuses to end.

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