2 MORE RARE P-38 FIGHTER PLANES TO FLY AGAIN.

Byline: Jeff Barnard Associated Press 

When John Burton and his crew first started to pick up the pieces of two P-38 fighter planes stored in a barn for nearly 30 years, they found the leavings of a family of skunks in one cockpit.

After more than a year of work, they hope to finish restoring the planes this fall, then stand back and watch their boss, Erickson Air-Crane owner Jack Erickson, give the thumbs up and roar into the sky in the most recognizable aircraft of World War II.

When they are finished, the planes will join just five other P-38s in the world that still fly regularly, said A. Kevin Grantham, author of ``P-Screamers, the History of the Surviving Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.''

``Out of all the World War II airplanes, the P-38 is probably the most prized of all of them, mainly because it is so rare,'' said Grantham, a satellite engineer in Frederick, Md.

Powered by twin 12-cylinder Allison engines that counter-rotate, the P-38 was the first aircraft to fly 400 mph, said Grantham. The prototype set a transcontinental record in 1939.

Nearly 10,000 P-38s were built, Grantham said. Though the P-51 Mustang emerged as the top fighter of the war, America's top ace, Dick Bong, got all 40 of his kills in a P-38 in the Pacific, said Grantham.

The P-38 escorted 8th Air Force bombers from England to Germany, where Luftwaffe pilots called it the forked-tail devil for the distinctive twin booms that stretched back from the engines to the plane's broad tail.

``I run into people all the time who have had a love affair with that airplane ever since the first time they saw one and just can't seem to get over it,'' said Lefty Gardner.

Gardner was a bomber pilot in World War II and is co-founder of the Confederate Air Force. His own P-38 always attracts crowds at air shows.

``They have to rub it a little, and dream, and occasionally I take them for a ride,'' Gardner said.

Rex Barber was flying a P-38 from a base on Guadalcanal when his squadron shot down the bomber carrying Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Navy and planner of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, over the Solomon Islands in April 1943.

``It was a wonderful airplane out there,'' said Barber, a mint farmer from the central Oregon town of Terrebonne. ``One, we had good altitude. We could get above people. Second, we had the speed on the Zero. Third, we had good firepower. Excellent firepower. Fourth, we had two engines, so if one of them went out over that water, we had a chance to get back.''

The two P-38s being restored in a hangar at the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport were built in April 1945 at the Lockheed plant in Burbank.

They were flown to Dallas, where the guns in the nose were replaced with aerial reconnaissance cameras before the planes were sold for surplus along with thousands of others after the war.

Mark Hurd Aerial Surveys bought the planes for use in California and retired them in the 1950s. In 1967, Bruce Pruett, a safety officer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, bought them for less than $10,000 in Santa Barbara.

When they are restored, they could be worth as much as $2 million.

Figuring he would restore them someday, Pruett dismantled the planes and hauled them to his parents' farm in Roseville, where he kept them in a barn. They stayed there until 1995, when he made a deal with Erickson, whose company pioneered helicopter logging.

In return for restoring both planes, Erickson will get to keep one for his Tillamook Naval Air Station Museum in Oregon, where his collection of 11 other World War II aircraft is on display. Pruett, who never learned to fly, will likely keep his plane there, too.