The Fighter Collection at Duxford flies aeroplanes that most museums would bolt to a plinth. Late last month one of the rarest of them had an engine problem on a maintenance check flight and ended up on its belly in a field northwest of Royston.

The pilot was not hurt. He climbed out unaided and talked the Duxford Fire and Rescue Team in to a remote site. The aeroplane came off worse.

The aircraft is G-CIIO, a Curtiss P-40C Warhawk carrying the United States Army serial 41-13357 — an early Allison-engined P-40 that has already been to Puerto Rico, the Soviet Union and a California restoration shop before it ever reached Cambridgeshire.

Gear up, on purpose

A wheels-up landing sounds like a failure. In a field, it is the correct answer.

Lowering the gear into unknown ground invites the mainwheels to dig into soft earth or catch a furrow, which stops one side of the aircraft while the rest keeps going. The result is a cartwheel, and a cartwheel in a 1941 fighter with a fuel tank behind the engine is how people die. Sliding in on the belly spreads the deceleration along the length of the airframe and keeps the aircraft the right way up.

It also writes off a lot of expensive metal. That is the trade, and every warbird pilot knows it before they take off.

Note the phrase “post-maintenance check flight”. That is precisely what a check flight is for: to find the problem with nobody else on board, over ground the pilot has already thought about, rather than in the middle of a display in front of a crowd.

The aeroplane that went to Russia

41-13357 was accepted by the United States Army Air Corps on 6 April 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. It first served at Patterson Field in Ohio, flying roughly a hundred hours, then went to Puerto Rico, where it is thought to have flown coastal and anti-submarine patrols.

At 603 hours it went back to the Curtiss factory in Buffalo, New York, was overhauled for Lend-Lease, and in December 1941 was shipped to the Soviet Union. What it did there is largely unknown. The Fighter Collection recovered it from the former USSR in the 1990s in poor condition.

The restoration was completed in the United States, and the aircraft made its first post-restoration flight on 5 August 2011 in the hands of Steve Hinton, then registered N80FR. It was shipped from Chino to Duxford in May and June 2014 and made its UK debut at Flying Legends that year.

Why a P-40C matters

Plenty of P-40s survive, but almost all of them are later models: the P-40E, N and similar variants with the deeper radiator chin and the heavier airframe. The early Hawk 81 family, the aircraft the British called the Tomahawk and the type flown by the Flying Tigers, is a genuinely different aeroplane, and airworthy examples are extremely scarce.

The Allison V-1710 underneath is part of the reason. It is a single V12 with no second chance, and it was designed at a moment when nobody expected these airframes to still be flying eighty-five years later. Warbird operators spend enormous sums keeping engines like this healthy, and even then they occasionally stop.

G-CIIO flying at the Duxford Battle of Britain Airshow, giving a sense of the aircraft that is now on the ground.

Que se passe-t-il ensuite ?

The Fighter Collection has not said whether the airframe will be rebuilt. Substantial damage on a warbird is not automatically fatal — this aircraft was already recovered from a far worse state once — but it is a long and expensive road, and the decision will take time.

For now the good news is the part that matters. The pilot walked away, nobody on the ground was hurt, and the aeroplane came down in an empty field rather than anywhere it could have done harm. Everything else is engineering.

Sources: The Fighter Collection statement; Royston Crow and Hunts Post; Aviation News; Warbird Aviation.