Photo: Platinum Fighter Sales
If you were an Allied pilot during the Second World War and saw a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190, one of two things would happen. Either you soil yourself in terror and kiss your rear end goodbye, or you start engaging in some of that pilot stuff and hope you come out of it in one piece. Nowadays, seeing one of the 30 or so Fw 190s that still remain is something of a right of passage, regardless of what side you thought had the better airplanes. But to outright own one? Now that'd turn you into a demigod among av-geeks.
But Platinum Fighter Sales out of Redondo Beach, California, is offering just such an opportunity to whoever can fork out enough cash to take it off their hands. This particular Fw 190 is the later-model A-8 variety. First leaving German factories in February 1944, just in time to take part in the defense of the Normandy beaches from the Allied invasions during D-Day. Spoiler alert, they weren't successful in said defense, but it'd be wrong to place the blame for such an awful conflict on an inanimate machine with some less-than-reputable characters behind the stick.
Half-baked attempts to anthropomorphize a fighter plane aside, this particular Fw-190A-8 made its first flight sometime before the end of the war in 1945 before a hard landing just before the war's end brought a premature end to its service. Its immediate history after the fact is somewhat up in the air, what with the government that ordered its construction imploding like a red hot nougat bar bathing in a deep fryer for too long.
What is known for certain is that at some point, a man named Dan Kirkland purchased the major remaining components of the airframe before it underwent a comprehensive and full restoration supported by the Flug Werk GmbH group of Germany. In this restoration, every nut, bolt, and wayward piece of the airframe was painstakingly rehabilitated over a period of some years before it was assembled back together and made to look like it did the day it left a German factory almost 80 years ago. Except this time around, the internals underneath are anything but stock.
For one thing, the BMW 801 14-cylinder radial engine native to the Fw 190 A-8 has been replaced by a Shvetsov ASh-82 derived from, if you can believe it or not, the Soviet Lavochkin La-5 and Petlyakov Pe-8 bomber. The very same Soviet aircraft that Luftwaffe pilots tried to shoot down in their Focke-Wulfs during the war. If that doesn't get Hermann Goering spinning in his non-existent grave, nothing will. But heck, when you're a rotund, drug-addicted megalomaniac whose Air Force bombed countless civilians, we're much less inclined to feel bad about it.
Though the plane is currently based out of Sweden, its current North American advertising listing is serviced through Platinum Fighter Sales, and its asking price of €1,795,000, or $1,880,495 and change, seems like a reasonable enough price. We've seen Spitfires and Mustangs sell for considerably more lately. But what do you fine folks think? Would you love to fly around all day in a German icon of World War II powered by a freakin Soviet engine? Or would you rather own a Mustang ten times out of ten? Let us know in the comments below.
Half-baked attempts to anthropomorphize a fighter plane aside, this particular Fw-190A-8 made its first flight sometime before the end of the war in 1945 before a hard landing just before the war's end brought a premature end to its service. Its immediate history after the fact is somewhat up in the air, what with the government that ordered its construction imploding like a red hot nougat bar bathing in a deep fryer for too long.
What is known for certain is that at some point, a man named Dan Kirkland purchased the major remaining components of the airframe before it underwent a comprehensive and full restoration supported by the Flug Werk GmbH group of Germany. In this restoration, every nut, bolt, and wayward piece of the airframe was painstakingly rehabilitated over a period of some years before it was assembled back together and made to look like it did the day it left a German factory almost 80 years ago. Except this time around, the internals underneath are anything but stock.
For one thing, the BMW 801 14-cylinder radial engine native to the Fw 190 A-8 has been replaced by a Shvetsov ASh-82 derived from, if you can believe it or not, the Soviet Lavochkin La-5 and Petlyakov Pe-8 bomber. The very same Soviet aircraft that Luftwaffe pilots tried to shoot down in their Focke-Wulfs during the war. If that doesn't get Hermann Goering spinning in his non-existent grave, nothing will. But heck, when you're a rotund, drug-addicted megalomaniac whose Air Force bombed countless civilians, we're much less inclined to feel bad about it.
Though the plane is currently based out of Sweden, its current North American advertising listing is serviced through Platinum Fighter Sales, and its asking price of €1,795,000, or $1,880,495 and change, seems like a reasonable enough price. We've seen Spitfires and Mustangs sell for considerably more lately. But what do you fine folks think? Would you love to fly around all day in a German icon of World War II powered by a freakin Soviet engine? Or would you rather own a Mustang ten times out of ten? Let us know in the comments below.
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