The Coast of North Carolina was fraught with activity during World War II as planes, battleships, submarines, and armies protected our shores. One such plane, the Thunderbolt P-47D, ran out of fuel and crashed on the beaches of Ocean Isle.
Ocean Isle, for the most part, was unpopulated at the time, and the place wreckage became buried by the sand, remaining there for decades. It wasn’t until the summer of 2000 when a particularly bad storm unearthed the wing of the plane.
Town officials roped off the remains of the plane and over time carefully had it excavated. It was moved to Charlotte, North Carolina to an outdoor aviation museum where it is paired with a non-wrecked version of the same plane.
