Fantastic FW 190 video

[drewpee]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

I have the same approach, you know that, but there's a bit of a slipper slope here..
In order to guarantee safe operation of the machine, you need to guarantee for structural integrity and robustness. The fact that the plane's structure and assembly are the same of 60 years ago doesn't guarantee for this integrity, and as you know you need to be able to check for stuff like defoliation and micro cracks on structural parts (spar, ribs, mono-coque, engine mounts etc..). The plane as it is could fly ONLY because of the American experimental category, but this doesn't mean that the insurance would take it for good: they send out their experts, assess the situation and report to their company, who would then shell out a price. If memory serves the first estimate was in the region of several million dollars (!!!), simply because there were no guarantees of a thorough investigation of the airframe (which can be done only by disassembly/dismantling). The owner didn't wanna hear about losing the fame of his plane being the most genuine, original one in the world in "airworthy" conditions, so they came to a standstill.
As a pilot, no matter what guarantees I'm given, I wouldn't be happy to fly something that is 60 years old and hasn't been stripped down and checked, especially on such a high performance machine with poor literacy on the subject in terms of in flight behaviour.

The bottom line is: would you strip down a unique machine of its original parts in order to make it airworthy (with all the risks it would come with, and losing original components), or would you preserve it in its original, stock conditions just because of its sheer value?

Totally agree. Keeping vintage AC in the sky as long as possible is great but 60+ year old parts will eventually fail. Only way to keep them flying is to continually replace the with non genuine parts. At some stage they will no longer be genuine.
I would personally give my left nut to be able to see as many original vintage combat AC in museums. I'd give my right nut to fly replicas.