Grumman rolled the prototype out just before the United States entered the war. The company had a house style of naming its fighters “Cats” — Wildcat, Hellcat, Bearcat — but the new torpedo bomber was publicly unveiled at a ceremony held, by coincidence, only days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The name “Avenger” was chosen to reflect the national mood: an aircraft that would carry America’s answer back to the enemy. It proved apt — within three years Avengers were sinking the largest warships Japan possessed.

Grumman’s Bethpage factory earned the nickname “the Grumman Iron Works” for the sheer structural strength of its aircraft. The Avenger inherited it. Bert Earnest’s TBF at Midway had its hydraulics shot out, its elevator cables severed and one wheel hanging, its turret gunner dead — and it still flew him and his wounded radioman back to a crash-landing at Midway. That ability to soak up damage and keep flying, over hundreds of kilometres of open ocean, was worth as much to aircrews as any performance figure.

The aircraft the Avenger replaced, the Douglas TBD Devastator, was slow, lightly built and by 1942 desperately obsolete. At Midway the Devastator squadrons were annihilated attacking the Japanese carriers. The Avenger was the answer already in the pipeline: faster, far tougher, better armed and better protected. Ironically its own first mission, flown by the Midway-based Avenger detachment of the same Torpedo 8, was nearly as costly — but the aircraft itself was sound, and mass production quickly made it the backbone of Navy torpedo aviation.

The Avenger was a wartime government product built by the thousand under military contract, so no clean, comparable flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour survives in the public record the way it does for modern jets. What is well documented is scale: nearly 9,839 were built in barely three years, most of them by General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft Division. Today the relevant cost is the price of keeping a warbird airworthy — a restored, flying Avenger is a multi-million-dollar aircraft, and each display flight burns a large radial engine’s worth of fuel and maintenance. Any precise period dollar figure you see should be treated as an estimate.