A random search for a World War II Navy aircraft paint scheme led to a touching relationship and an inspiring flight, just last week. Evan Fagen, chief pilot at Fagen Fighters WWII Museum in Granite Falls, Minnesota, was tasked with picking the livery for the Grumman F6F Hellcat the museum was restoring to flying condition.
Fagen told a local television station that he did a random internet search and liked what he saw in the paint scheme of USN aviator Don McPherson’s Hellcat. “You never know where it’s going to go,” Fagen said. “[I] never thought in a million years that, several years later, we’d have this great friend in Don.”
McPherson is one of the very few—perhaps the only—living WWII fighter aces, having destroyed five Japanese aircraft in air-to-air combat (and one on the ground) during his tour of duty in the South Pacific from March to September 1945. Fagen asked his permission to use his paint scheme on the museum’s Hellcat, and he agreed. That led to Fagen Fighters offering Nebraska resident McPherson, now 102, a ride in another WWII Navy combat plane—an ultra-rare Curtiss Helldiver dive bomber, last Friday, flown by USAF Lt. Col. Ray Fowler of Carrollton, Georgia. In a video interview the next day, McPherson said, “I hadn’t been in a World War Two airplane until yesterday. Brought back some really, really cool memories.”
