School Day

Uncoiling Airacobra’s tale

0 Comments | Buffalo News, Jul 6, 2010 | by Jackie Smith

If the corroded shell of a World War II fighter plane could talk, it would end the mystery of how it ended up at the bottom of a lake in northern Russia.

Members of the Ira G. Ross Aerospace Museum are making strides to restore the P-39Q Airacobra, which was discovered with both its leather-bound logbook and the remains of a Russian pilot six years ago. The plane sits in pieces at the old Bell Aircraft plant in Wheatfield, where it was manufactured in November 1943.

Museum officials hope to exhibit the aircraft in about a year, another tribute to the region’s manufacturing prowess during World War II.

“It’s an aircraft representing one of the 10,000 that went to help our allies, which is a monumental effort that Western New York was able to mount,” said Hugh M. Neeson, director of development at the museum in HSBC Arena. “It made a major impact because the Soviet Union was actively fighting the Germans much earlier than the Americans.”

The plane and its pilot went missing during a 1944 ferry flight out of Novinka, near Murmansk in northern Russia, to northern Norway, according to the Web site for Warbird Finders, the British company that pulled the aircraft from its icy grave 60 years later.

A fisherman discovered the plane at the bottom of Lake Mart-Yavr near Russia’s Norwegian border in July 2004. It was disassembled and transported to Britain, where Neeson saw it in March 2008. He said he considered it to be one of the “finest artifacts” the group could have been able to acquire.

The museum purchased the aircraft for $400,000, returning it to the old Bell site in April 2009
leather restoration