The Last Flight Of Yellow Ten

L/E of 199 Giclee Prints - 10 A/P's (Canvas or Paper A/P's come rolled)
S/N by the Artist
Image Size: 27" x 19.5"
Paper Size: 31.5" x 24"

Plane Type: Fw.190

As the Allies tightened the noose around what remained of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, surviving Luftwaffe pilots, whose worst fear (worse than being killed in combat) was to be captured by the Red Army, as it rapidly advanced across Germany from the east, as not much imagination was required to foresee what the Russians might have in store for their former aerial tormentors, whom they now had on the run. By April, the situation was hopeless, even to the most optimistic, so to some, a more attractive alternative to capture by the communists was surrender to the British or the American forces, sometimes only a short flight away. Yellow Ten "Yellow Ten", so named for the colored number on either side of the fuselage, was assigned to JG.26 in March of 1945, and due to the chaotic conditions of that period, not much is known of its short service record, other than it was captured, or surrendered in April (or as late as May) at the Luftwaffe airbase at Flensburg on the Danish frontier,which, at the time, was in the hands of the advancing Allied forces.

This particular machine was eventually shipped to the United States for evaluation, donated subsequently to Georgia Tech, and by 1955, had arrived at an advanced state of decrepitude, due to vandalism and neglect. It is now fully restored to better than new condition, at the expense of warbird collector, Doug Champlin (Champlin Fighter Museum), an extremely rare example of the last iteration of the Fw.190 evolutionary line, the Fw. 190D-13, the 17th example, and probably one of the last of the 190s, a total of about 20,000 Fw.190s of all series had been produced by the war's end. The artist was commissioned by Mr. Champlin in 1987 to depict what it may have looked like as the machine was surrendered to RAF forces occupying Flensburg (if that was, indeed, the case) during the last few days of April, 1945, and it is displayed at the Museum, as of this writing.

PLANE JUNKIE - The Last Flight Of Yellow Ten by Jack Fellows (Fw.190)