We’re About To Get A Flyable XP-82 Twin Mustang-See What It Looks Like Now
Photo Credit: Tom Reilly
We Should All Thank People Like This Guy.
The thing about restored warbirds is that as rare as they are, they wouldn’t even be here anymore if it wasn’t for countless hours of restoration done by museums, volunteers, and private citizens.
Case in point; Tom Reilly.
We stumbled across his website when looking for some neat information about the XP-82 Twin Mustang and oh boy were we surprised. We’ll include a link to that website below since he’s been cataloging this restoration brilliantly, but we’ll give a quick rundown and some of the best pictures in this article.
To see all the pictures of this restoration, click here to visit Tom Reilly’s website.
Tom is no stranger to restoring warbirds. Since 1971, he’s restored 5 North American Yale Trainers but his pride and joy was a B-25. Since he knew what he was doing, he then worked with museums helping to restore the B-17 909 and B-24 Witchcraft.
Then, in 2008, he got his hands on an XP-82 rotting away on one of his client’s properties. Although it took him almost a decade to get it, he’s now in full swing restoring this rare aircraft. There are only 5 of these aircraft on static display, but looking at the work Tom is doing, we might have one flying in the air pretty shortly.
Below you’ll find a video that’ll show you a quick takeoff of this plane. It’s pretty incredible that we have any footage of this fighter at all since it’s so rare but now we might have even newer videos of that happening in the near future.
