Another interesting Aviation story by Andrew King, always with links to my hometown. To think there could still be parts of a P-38 Lightning scattered about McGregor lake. Just as interesting is the ‘career path’ of these Warbirds – from delivery to the USAF, to surplus-ed Air Racers and finally to Air Survey work.
A quest to find the wreckage of a crashed WW2 P-38 Lightning in the woods north of Ottawa…
During World War Two the German Luftwaffe nicknamed it der Gabelschwanz-Teufel, or “ the fork-tailed devil”. The American built Lockheed P-38 Lightning was aptly nick-named due to its distinctive twin-engine booms and central pilot pod paired with exceptional flight characteristics. The P-38 was a formidable opponent for the Luftwaffe in Europe and for the Japanese in the Pacific, who referred to it as “two planes, one pilot”.
Developed as a twin engined high altitude interceptor to attack hostile aircraft, the P-38 entered service in 1942 and remained in operation with the United States Air Force until 1949. After the war, thousands of P-38 Lightnings became obsolete aircraft as the aviation world entered the jet age. These surplus P-38s were sold off into a variety of new roles including foreign air forces…
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Model Airplane Maker 
It is amazing what can be found in lakes. In Maine, divers discovered two F4U-1 Corsairs deep in Sebago Lake. During WWII, two RAF pilots training at Brunswick NAS crashed into the lake after one of them touched his wingtip to the water. The people who discovered the wrecks had photos showing them in amazingly good shape and wanted to salvage them. The UK government appeared in court and requested that they be treated as grave sites and left undisturbed. The court agreed, and to my knowledge they are still there. Can you imagine how many wartime wrecks are still to be discovered? Thank you for posting the P-38 story.
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