The Curtiss P-40 was an American single-engine, single-seat, all-metal fighter and ground attack aircraft.
The Korean War in 1950 delayed USAF plans to retire the P-51 Mustang, and the Canadian P-40s were the only high performance aircraft available.
From the mid 1970s to late 1980s, collectors from the United States started traveling to former South Pacific airfields and recovered a second generation of P-40 survivors.
The fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s made a third generation of P-40s survivors available and numerous examples were recovered from former battlefields near Murmansk.
There are still numerous example of wrecked P-40s that have yet to be recovered in China, United States, Canada as well as Russia in addition to the South Pacific sites.