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Feds get one right


Subdeacon Joe

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To settle Alaska case of pilfered plane parts, Georgia salvagers pay up

 

 

 

 

A Georgia airplane restoration company has reached a

settlement with federal prosecutors in Alaska over old and abandoned

aircraft parts its salvagers took without permission from a crash site

on federal land near Fairbanks.

The restorers -- Douglas,

Georgia-based B-25 Group LLC -- paid the U.S. Bureau of Land Management

$55,000 to settle a five-year investigation into their unauthorized use

of public land, according to a written statement Thursday from the

Alaska U.S. Attorney's Office. The parts they took were left on the

Tanana Flats south of Fairbanks from the crash of an F-82 Twin Mustang

nearly six decades earlier, the federal prosecutors said.

"B-25 Group initially asserted the parts had been lawfully acquired from a salvage yard in Fairbanks," the statement says.

According

to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, the F-82 fighter

resembled two P-51 Mustang fuselages joined together on one wing and was

designed to escort bombers on long-range missions.

Three F-82s at

Fairbanks' Ladd Air Force Base -- now Fort Wainwright, an Army post --

took off for a practice flight in January 1950, and one crashed and

killed the two men onboard, according to the federal prosecutors'

statement. In July 2008, the B-25 Group salvagers located and removed

some parts for use in another restored plane, the prosecutors said.

Of

the settlement money, $50,000 will go to further BLM recovery efforts

of the crashed F-82 and $5,000 is considered a civil penalty to be used

on other protection of historic aviation sites, the prosecutors said.

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