Author Description

Would you 'restore' an expensive piece of antique furniture by stripping it down to the bare wood, and then re-coating it in a high-gloss polyurethane varnish? If you did, then at a stroke you've probably wiped its value from several thousand pounds down to a few hundred, and destroyed its original character. The same principle holds good for vintage aircraft restoration and preservation. At the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton, is a rare Second World War Chance Vought Corsair fighter aircraft. To fully understand the aircraft and unravel the myths and truths surrounding KD431, an enormous research task lay ahead. Thousands of hours of painstaking detail work were required to achieve what initially looked like an impossible goal. The skill and patience of all those concerned was eventually rewarded, but not necessarily with the results expected or at times wished for. The end result was the revealing of what is probably the last truly original Corsair fighter left in existence and one of very few Second World War aircraft displayed in such original condition.