Six Year Battle Ends In Victory For Minnesota Mechanic

It took a special act of Congress, but after six years of legal fights, a 50-year old Northwest Airline mechanic can keep his Brewster Corsair.

A Minnesota federal judge last week settled a long-running lawsuit between Lex Cralley and the Justice Department over remains of the fighter. 

"I've been under a cloud so long, it almost seems like a dream that it's over," Cralley told the Minneapolis-St. Paul Pioneer-Press.

The aircraft sits in pieces inside Cralley's workshed. But he's so thrilled that he plans to exhibit the warbird at AirVenture 2005 in Oshkosh, WI.

"It remains a piece of naval aviation history to be shared," said Cralley.

But he has his work cut out for him. Restoring the WWII Corsair to flight status will take years of meticulous reconstruction and well over a million dollars, he said. That's the price of dreaming big.

Cralley salvaged the Corsair wreckage 15 years ago from a swamp in North Carolina, where it had been buried in the muck after the aircraft went down during a training flight in 1944. The crash killed Marine Lt. Robin C. Pennington.

Cralley took the wreckage to his home in Princeton, MN, and began trying to figure out how to restore the elegant warbird. But almost ten years after he hauled the wrecked fighter home, the Navy decided it wanted its Corsair back. What was once the Navy's, officials argued, is always the Navy's.

That sparked a big battle -- not only in Minnesota, but in Washington, where members of Congress pointed to the Navy's attempts to reclaim the wreckage as yet another sign of out-of-control government.

FMI: www.navy.mil