An ongoing question: restore an aircraft to flying condition or restore it for static display? While it is great to have an aircraft in flying condition, sooner or later the risks outweigh the benefit of having it flying. Sadly, we seem to be losing too many aircraft from flying related accident.
Edit: sorry, didn’t mean to leave out the human cost of these accidents. What I meant was is it worth having these vintage aircraft still flying if the risk to both aircrew and aircraft (and possibly spectator) is too high?
I think one can't ignore the will of people to keep WWII aircraft flying. I can understand the limit of static display, aircraft are born to fly.
Warbirds have regularly crashed for as long as I can remember (the early 90's) I remember reading Le Fana de l'Aviation back then, and every month or two months was a noticeable crash or tragedy (I can remember Jeff Ethel death notice in 1997, the last flyable british Mosquito in 1995, and so many others). They are delicate machines from another era, and even with aces veterans pilots, bad things will always happen.
I remember wondering how could so many deadly crashes could still happen with the proverbial "modern technology" - but well it seems warbirds are warbirds, and even pampered with ultra modern tech by their mechanics, they still can do bad things once in flight. There is seemingly no workaround this, even with top notch mechanics, modern technologies, and lots of money thrown at them.
One heartbreaking example was France one and only flyable D-520s (among exactly four left by 1980). Veteran pilot Christian Bove in the late 70's fought teeth and nails to have it flying again, and he succeded... only to be killed by that D-520 a sad day of July 1986. At the end of an air show, just to add to the overall trauma.
Bottom line: those heartbreaking accidents robbing us of beloved pilots and wonderful aircraft have always happened.
Maybe that peculiar accident is different, depends from the nature of the initial mistake and what happened afterwards. Maybe the ATC or P-63 initial mistake was small, but, since it was a P-63 with all its limits as a warbird, it became that huge tragedy.
I will say something very stupid, but, starting from the same initial mistake perhaps a Pilatus PC-9 would not have collided with a C-130 Hercules the same way. But they are different aircraft from different times.
