I had read in a magazine somewhere , that over in Europe, and the warbird market expanded, and lot of the WW-2 aircraft were being bought up and being replaced with what were supposed to be fiberglass replicas. I would imagine it would be almost as hard and as expensive to build a fiberglass replica as it would to build the real thing in the same size and scale.
It would be neat if in this day and age of computers that a listingof all the accessable gate guards could be made up so one could look for them while traveling. I know there is an F-104 Starfighter on the Will Rogers turnpike in Oklahoma, and I ran across an F-111 Ardvark in a small town in New Mexico or southe west Texas on the way to VSC one year. I the small town I live in, Florissant, MO there is a F-101 Voodoo that has been vandalized quite a bit, largely because they have it put in a spot where it isn't in plain sight. It was in Texas ANG colors when it was aquired and was a William Tell exercise winner to boot. They repainted it to look like one of the early models as it rolled of the McDonnell production line with Chief Test Pilot, Joe Dobronski's name under the canopy. There is also an F-100 and an F-15 at the entrance to what we callled "the Navy Base" at Lambert Field, and an F-4 Phantom near the offices of what's left of the local ANG unit. It's worth every penny it costs to keep these old warriors visible for future generations to see and learn about, in my opinion.
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee