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This Curtiss C-46 Commando Played Second Fiddle to the Skytrain, Now It's Like a Barn Find

Not every vintage warbird is destined to spend the twilight of its life taking to the skies for the endless inspiration of those below watching. The sad truth is, a good percentage of existing warplanes from World War II especially will never, ever fly again.
Curtiss Commando Glenn Curtiss Museum 11 photos
Photo: Benny Kirk/autoevolution
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This barn find-status Curtiss Commando is most definitely one such example. It serves an entirely different purpose in 2022, standing gate guard outside the Glenn H Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York. It's a delightful warehouse-sized building home to so many beautiful cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and airplanes the early American aviation pioneer designed over his 52 years on this Earth and so much more.

However, it is a C-46 cargo plane built two decades after Curtiss's untimely death that greets all goers at the gate to a museum dedicated to Mr. Curtiss's life. In so many ways, the Curtiss Commando was utterly overshadowed by the exponentially more famous and well celebrated Douglas C-47 Skytrain and its civilian airliner cousin, the DC-3.

For some context, over 10,000 C-47s saw service in the years during and just after the Second World War. It was a cargo plane so sturdy that people swap turboprop engines into their airframes to this very day. Ensuring they will be a staple of the skies for at least another century. By comparison, the Commando had well short of half as many examples built, less than 3,500 by most estimates. They were also maintenance nightmares of the highest order.

The twin Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp 18-cylinder radial engines were state-of-the-art. But it seems in Glenn Curtiss's absence that more than a few corners had been cut, as the Commando was introduced to combat over Europe and Japan. The plane also had a nasty habit of exploding in mid-air, seemingly at complete random, a problem attributed to fuel leaking from the tanks into the wings where sparks or strong jolts could set it alight.

Curtiss Commando Glenn Curtiss Museum
Photo: Benny Kirk/autoevolution
Despite carrying more cargo and better performance at high altitudes, Curtiss could not compete with the feverous production pace of their rivals at Douglas. This particular example, tail number 44-78772, spent its life perpetually driven through the proverbial meat grinder that was mid-20th century cargo service.

Records indicate it was delivered Army Air Corps in Greenville, Mississippi, on September 26th, 1943, and spent the Second World War ferrying supplies and personnel between Army Air Corps bases in the continental United States. After the war, it was transferred to South Plains Field In Lubbock, Texas. From there, it would spend 30,487 hours over the next 44 years and 11 months with various short-range cargo airliners across America.

It even shrugged off a very hard landing into a snowbank on a frozen lake in Anchorage, Alaska, on May 17th, 1975. In a shocking turn of events, U.S. federal police arrested the owners of this Commando in August 1988 under accusations of illegal firearms trafficking.

It was promptly transferred to the ownership of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, which proceeded to loan it to the National Warplane Museum in Elmira, Horseheads, New York. Before its final transfer to Hammondsport in 2002. A destination this plane isn't due to depart any time soon.

Curtiss Commando Glenn Curtiss Museum
Photo: Benny Kirk/autoevolution
Commando 44-78772's sat on a makeshift plinth on top of a field of grassy wetlands just outside the museum's second building ever since. Apart from a few changes and touchups to the paint over the years, it is abundantly clear the last two decades especially have been pretty darn tough on this old bird.

The aforementioned paint job is configured presently in the Air Transport Command camo it would have sported during "Over the Hump" supply missions to China from bases in India and modern-day Myanmar. However, years of brutally sweltering New York summers and even more intense winters have left this paint looking faded from nose to tail.

It's pretty much impossible to get up close to the plane without going knees deep in swamp water, so some photos taken from on top of the museum's concrete entry gate would have to suffice. From this vantage point, it was possible to see families of birds flying into and out of the engine nacelles where the Commando's twin Pratt & Whitney R2800 Double Wasp engines presumably still sit.

Said bird's droppings accumulate on the plane's twin front landing gears, something not at all uncommon among museum aircraft stored outdoors. If the knee-deep semi-solid grass under your feet and endless flocks of birds defecating all over the ground don't scare people off, the several colonies of those little dirtbags with wings called European Yellowjackets certainly will.

Curtiss Commando Glenn Curtiss Museum
Photo: Benny Kirk/autoevolution
There's a reason museum staff venture inside the internals of this airplane as little as possible. It's the same reason any of you shouldn't either. In any case, trying to enter this Curtiss Commando without express permission is liable to land you in a local jail cell covered in bird excrement and in painful wasp stings. You cannot say we didn't warn you.

Check back for more from our trip to the Glenn H Curtiss Museum here on autoevolution.
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