When people started talking about P-51s it reminded me of a story I heard.
We do alot of work at a place called Vought Aircraft in Nashville,TN. They make wings only now and they've changed names several times over the years but durring WWII they built P-51s.
Last year they were cleaning the place up and scrapping a bunch of stuff. We hauled most of it from there. The guy we were working for was wanting them to clean up an overgrown area in the back of the property. He ran it by his boss and he said "no way" and then told him what was in there.
This guy said that when WWII was over they had several completed planes and the military canceled the contract. With nothing to do with all all the P-51s and scrap not worth anything they just pushed them into a ravine on the back of the property (guy said he's seen old pics of this). Over the years they kept dumping stuff back there untill the ravine was full.
He said several people that work there have wanted to dig the planes up over the years but there has been alot of stuff dumped in there over the years and they didn't want to dig in there and open up an enviromental nightmare.
You bring a shovel and I'll show you the spot but you'll have to climb the fence and be on your own
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On a related note, When we were doing all the scrapping there someone laid the jigs to build the C-130 wings in a room where we were told to scrap everything in there(they have the contact to build replacement C-130 wings). I did think it odd that they had stamped on them "property of US Air Force" but I didn't know what they were and we were told to scrap everything in the room.
About a week later I got a call from the guy we were working for and he was all excited. They couldn't find the jigs and after he described them to me I told him where they were
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It's funny to see guys in suits climbing around in scrap plies at the scrap yard looking for the jigs. There was a big stink over it and I don't think they ever found the jigs.
They said they thought that may be the only set left so I may have single handedly sent the C-130 into early retirement.