In Reply to: Bought Another Moto-Tug (I gotta be insane . .) posted by Paladin (Bob In PA) on September 25, 2009 at 22:02:44:
Somebody in a Ford collectors magazine estimated that there are less than 100 tugs left out of 3000. Actually, that's better than the B-24's, of which there are only maybe a dozen left worldwide.
It was a crime how the Army and navy (and USAF when it came along) destroyed the WW2 warbirds. It would have been so easy to save a dozen of each model and park them in the desert but no one did. Brand new B-24's and B-17's were flown to storage/scrapping facilities as they came off the assembly line and the government tried desperately to cancel the contracts and stop production.
There are quite a few B-17's around as the Navy and Coast Guard retrofitted several dozen as air-sea rescue birds. The B-24's were not so lucky. They were considered obsolescent by the end of the war and all were serapped. The survivors today are bring-backs from overseas air forces that bought them for cheap and a few recovered wrecks.
On airplanes, the government recovered 7 cents on the dollar from scrapping them.
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