CURTISS Warhawk (N940AK)

great

Must be awesome to fly a Spitfire!!

Um Ed that's a P40 not a Spitfire.

Legendary P40... Flying Tigers.. !part of history.. Nice picture Tim..

Beautiful picture but I have a quick question; is that paint job authentic or is this a combination of paint schemes? Were there any USAAF P40s with sharks mouths before Pearl Harbor? Asking because 1) This plane is in US, not Chinese, markings - the AvG/Flying Tigers had Chinese markings, 2) I thought the red dots inside the US roundels were removed soon after Pearl Harbor to avoid confusion with Japanese planes. Thanks!

@ Benjamin Taub. I did a bot of looking around at period photographs of the P-40. I could not turn up any with both a shark nose and the red dot insignia, I did find a few with the ball star in white, as well as lend lease RAF P40s (iirc that RAF pilots were the first to use the shark mouths). That said, I would not find it hard to believe that this livery did exist at some point.

I suspect that this livery was how they arrived in South China as the AVG was "forming".

However, the spinner colors then were likely all OD Green. The bright colors were a later ruse to make the Japanese think there were more aircraft than there were.