North American T-28C Trojan

BAe Hawk T.1A

N167F North American P-51-D Mustang c/n 122-40447 - USAAF 44-73877 - Groningen Airport in Holland - 28/04/1996

The North American P-51D Mustang is a single-seat attacker/fighter aircraft. The Mustang was originally designed by North American Aviation Corp as the Model N.A.73 at the request of the British Air Purchasing Commission for the Royal Air Force (RAF). The prototype Model N.A.73X, NX19998, flew first on 26 October 1940, only 117 days after the project started. The early NA-73 Mustang fitted with an Allison V-1710 engine, was an excellent low-altitude reconnaissance fighter, but had low performance above 15000ft. After re-engining with the Rolls Royce Merlin, the P-51B was one of the best fighters of WWII. The most produced model of the Mustang was the P-51D-NA that went in production in 1944. The P-51D-NA, was an attack/fighter plane equipped with a 1695 hp Rolls-Royce (Packard) Merlin V-1650-7 engine. The armament consisted of six fixed 12.7 mm machine-guns in the wings and some aircraft had rocket pylons added to the undersides of the wings to carry up to ten rockets per plane. 6502 P-51D-NA planes were manufactured. Total production of all models was 15,576.

The 1944-built Mustang N167F of the Scandinavian Historic Flight Ltd. is not only a guest at the airshows in Europe. In 1989, painted in green colours and called "Cisco", it was one of the aircraft acting in the film "Memphis Belle". When it came in for refuelling at Groningen Airport Eelde in the Netherlands on 28 April 1996, it was painted in WWII USAF cs as 473877 "B6-S". The "Old Crow" was that day on route England - Norway. The "Old Crow" saw RCAF service from 1951 to 1958 as 9279. It was registered: N6320T, CF-PCZ and N167F. After it crashed in Euless, USA, on 1 September 1968 the airframe was rebuilt by Vintage aircraft of Ft. Collins. After the restoration was finished, the "Old Crow" made its first flight in 1985. The real "Old Crow" was USAAF serial 44-14450 from 357th Fighter Group, 363rd Fighter Squadron, 8th Air Force, Leiston, Suffolk, UK. The precise variant of the N167F is P-51D-25-NA, which indicates that North American built it at Inglewood in the USA.