Several lives remain for this restored Cat

There’s a brand-new-looking Grumman Hellcat on the scene that is the oldest of the F6F breed extant.

When this F6F-3 and its contemporaries faced World War II combat in the Pacific, this one came back when some did not.

When the war ended and the U.S. Navy had a stash of newer F6F-5 models, plus other aircraft in production or on the boards that made the F6F-3 increasingly obsolete, this one escaped the scrapper.

Civilian owners, including an airline president, enjoyed flying this Hellcat.

An engine-out episode in 1977 resulted in a disastrous crash landing that tore up the Hellcat badly, and caused serious harm to its devoted pilot-owner at that time, Bill Compton of Canby, Oregon.

Compton made it a lifelong mission to seek F6F parts in several states for the rebuilding of his beloved Hellcat. Declining health eventually intruded on that effort, and before Bill’s death in 2014, the Hellcat was purchased for the Allied Fighters warbird project in Chino, California, which features other rare machines brought back from the brink.

As with Allied’s immaculately restored P-47D Thunderbolt “Dottie Mae,” this vintage F6F-3 was painstakingly renewed by Mike Breshears and his team at Vintage Airframes at the Caldwell, Idaho, airport.

For Mike, a warbird restoration is a multi-year project that assembles, refurbishes, and in some cases manufactures pieces to exacting standards for authenticity and safety. Much of that craftsmanship might go unseen beneath a coat of paint, and Mike makes sure that paint job upholds the standards of quality found in the sheetmetal beneath it.

In the absence of photographs of this specific Hellcat during its wartime Navy service aboard the aircraft carrier USS Sangamon, and with knowledge about the ways in which early wartime camouflage schemes were sometimes crudely painted over later in the war, Mike decided the best look for this, the oldest F6F-3, would be the blue and gray colors it wore when delivered from the Grumman factory in 1943.

That’s just the latest color scheme for this survivor. The oldest image I have seen of this Hellcat, registered N4965V, is circa 1960 when pioneering warbird collector Mike Coutches of Hayward, California, owned it.

At that time, it still wore overall sea blue navy coloration. Subsequently it gained a bright blue-and-white camouflage style paint scheme, with a large red band around the aft fuselage.

This Hellcat was really stylin’ around 1970 when Charles F. Willis, Jr., bought it while he was president of Alaska Airlines. Livery of the day on Alaska’s Boeing 727 jetliners was called Golden Nugget, with a stylized golden eagle along the sides of the fuselage, and a ring of golden disks on the vertical tail encircling the lettering “Golden Nugget jet,” all on a white fuselage.

Willis’ Hellcat soon sported the same markings, with the legend “Little Nugget” on the tail.

As a teenager in the Seattle area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I saw the Hellcat go from bright blue to Little Nugget paint, and Little Nugget became the first airplane I ever photographed in an air-to-air photo flight formation.

I was a brash 19-year-old who contacted Alaska Airlines to talk with Willis. To his eternal credit, the airline president responded to this eager kid, and on the day of the scheduled flight, I remember Willis saying over the phone, “Meet me over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge at 3 p.m.”

Ray Pepka, a stalwart in the Pacific Northwest Aviation Historical Foundation, volunteered to fly his Cessna 310 as the photo ship. At the appointed hour, I could see the bridge from my vantage point in the rear of the Cessna as I scanned the sky for the white Hellcat. Like he would come loping along nice and easy. What was I thinking?

Willis, who had completed his wartime Naval aviation career as a Hellcat pilot in the Pacific, used the element of surprise to bounce us like a decent fighter pilot would.

After that, he carefully sidled up on the right side of the 310 as I ran through film in my 35mm Exa camera and a borrowed Rollei 120 medium format camera that produced the salient image of the day.

At one point as I banged away on the shutter, I noticed I could no longer keep the entire F6F in the frame. Pausing to look up, I was astounded to find the left wingtip of the Hellcat behind the right tip tank of the Cessna 310, tight like a Blue Angel.

Charlie backed out to a good photo distance, and I was hooked on this kind of work.

We headed north over Puget Sound until, at last, Willis broke off the formation because we were nearing the Canadian border. A smart 90° pitchout from Little Nugget, and we were alone in the sky.

Charlie Willis moved on to other endeavors, and Bill Compton of Canby, Oregon, bought Little Nugget. Bill began the process of putting a representative triple-tone World War II navy camouflage scheme on the former Little Nugget.

Bill was an affable presence at air shows throughout the Pacific Northwest and into British Columbia for the Abbotsford International Air Show, sometimes flying his Hellcat alongside friend Jack Lenhardt and his FM-2 Wildcat.

It all came to a crashing, metal-rending halt on June 12, 1977, when loss of power led to an off-airport landing that tore parts of the airframe asunder and seriously injured Bill Compton.

But Bill would not let his beloved Hellcat die, and he carefully preserved the wreck in a barn on his Oregon farm. Bill spent years tracking down leads on the location of more Hellcat parts to rebuild N4965V, but declining health intervened before he could do the job. Bill Compton died in November 2014.

Bill’s passion for this Hellcat saved it, and made it possible for Mike Breshears’ expert team to conduct the restoration that today creates a masterpiece like-new F6F-3 Hellcat.

As this is written, first flight is expected soon, once the FAA gives it the green light.

This Hellcat has survived thanks to the passions of interested aviators over many decades and now it is poised for another round of appreciation by new generations.