Two priceless vintage aircraft are up for sale and their asking price is correspondingly lofty. A rare CF-104 Starfighter in flying condition is being offered by a non-profit for $4.25 million and one of a handful of flying Nakajima A6M-2 Zero fighters is on the block for $5 million. The Zero, offered by Platinum Fighter Sales was pulled from the jungle of the Solomon Islands in 1965. It was built in 1941 and shot down on Feb. 4, 1943. The rebuild took decades and involved 60,000 man hours including the manufacture of 14,000 parts. Everything is faithfully restored except the engine which was swapped for a more reliable and serviceable Pratt and Whitney 1830 radial. It has 362.6 flight hours on it.
I kind of hesitate at Platinum Fighter Sales calling this a “Nakajima” Zero. Yes, it was built by Nakajima, but the design was from Mitsubishi with production farmed out to the other company.
Boeing, Vultee, and Douglas all built B-17s during WWII (the BVD consortium), but you never hear one called a “Douglas B-17.”
I believe this bird showed up at the Willow Run Airshow the year the Yankee Air Museum burned down. One has to see these in flight to understand exactly why the IJN held the upper hand at the beginning of WWII. For more context on flying this rare bird read Saburō Sakai’s autobiography, “Samurai”
~Rob
The Starfighter is about the coolest plane ever built but even if a person has enough disposable income to buy it, operating it would be a different matter. How would a person find the people and parts to keep up with it, at any price? I love this plane. It’s Tony Nelson cool. What are the regulations on a civilian and supersonic flight?
No restrictions provided the M1.0+ portion occurs far enough out over water that you are not in U.S. controlled airspace so that the sonic boom does not reach land. I believe Concorde had to be sub-sonic out to 200NM from shore?