After 68 Years Underwater, A WWII Plane Is Back To Its Former Glory

An FM-2 Wildcat was pulled from the bottom of Lake Michigan and was used for training and took more than a decade to restore.

However, restoring a plane submerged at the bottom of Lake Michigan for almost 70 years is far from easy. From the tail, all the up to the cockpit is all reskinned.

Phil Lavoy, the FM-2 Wildcat restoration lead said that they didn’t have enough tooling or the processes that Grumman used to construct the plane. “We had to create some things that are just literally from our imagination and experience,” he said.

The restoration team started a process to save as many parts as possible. The total cost to restore this project is approximately $700,000. However, all the hard work restoring the plane was worth it knowing it would soon become a part of the museum’s collection in Hudson, Massachusetts.