Your Thursday Morning Eye Candy: In Fort Worth, Restoring the Last “Truck Killer”

These are detail shots of the A26A before restoration from Franklin Poole on Vimeo.

Thanks to an early-morning e-mail from Friend of Unfair Park PeterK, I spent the better part of the last hour getting a history lesson on the the Douglas A-26 Invader, which first took flight to fight in World War II and served well into the Vietnam War, where the twin-engine light bomber earned the moniker “Truck Killer,” as the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine reminds us this month. There’s an accompanying video as well.

There’s but one flyable A-26 remaining — the one parked at present at the Vintage Flying Museum at Meacham Field in Fort Worth, where Joshua’s Jim Terry and his Pacific Prowler Non Profit Organization are attempting to restore the plane — nicknamed “Special K” — as “a ‘flying’ memorial to the valiant aircrews who flew in the secretive service of the United States Air Force during the Vietnam War.” And during this process, filmmaker Franklin Poole’s been documenting the whole thing on an expansive, frequently updated Vimeo page, where he’s not only captured the restoration process but also spoken with the pilots who flew the Invader — pilots nicknamed Nimrods, after the Bible’s mighty hunter.