WWII PV-2 Harpoon Returns to March Field

March Field Air Museum has brought together all major pieces of its Lockheed PV-2 Harpoon in Riverside, ending a yearslong split between sites in Atwater and Southern California. (vintageaviationnews.com) Vintage Aviation News reported April 21 that the move capped more than two years of work to secure the last components of the World War II patrol bomber. The museum says the aircraft is BuNo 37216, a Navy PV-2 delivered in 1944. (vintageaviationnews.com) (marchfield.org) The Riverside museum plans to reassemble the aircraft for static display near its entrance, where it would become one more large artifact in a collection that the museum says includes more than 119 aircraft. March Field Air Museum is on the edge of the active flight line at March Air Reserve Base and is open Tuesday through Sunday. (vintageaviationnews.com) (marchfield.org) The PV-2 Harpoon was the Navy’s late-war update of the Lockheed Ventura, a land-based patrol bomber used for anti-submarine patrols, maritime strikes and long-range bombing. The National Naval Aviation Museum says the improved Harpoon entered service in 1944 with a heavier weapons load and more carrying capacity. (history.navy.mil) (marchfield.org) March Field’s example also carries a long civilian afterlife. After Navy service, the aircraft went into storage in Arizona in 1954, then was converted for crop-dusting with a pesticide tank in its former bomb bay and later flew in Wyoming and California under civil registrations including N7256C and N10PV. (vintageaviationnews.com) (aerialvisuals.ca) That civilian career ended years ago, but the preservation effort kept moving. Vintage Aviation News reported that Tony Rocha acquired the airplane in 2014 while he was curator at Castle Air Museum, and volunteers disassembled it at Sonoma Valley Airport and trucked it to Atwater. (vintageaviationnews.com) March Field says Rocha later donated BuNo 37216 to the museum, and older museum posts show the transfer happened piece by piece rather than in one shipment. In a 2023 Facebook post, the museum called the airplane its “Lunch box” bomber as another section headed south. (marchfield.org) (facebook.com) The aircraft itself is a big one for an entry display: March Field lists a 52-foot length, a 74-foot-11-inch wingspan, a 36,000-pound loaded weight and twin Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines rated at 2,000 horsepower each. Those dimensions help explain why moving and reassembling it took years instead of weeks. (marchfield.org) When the work is finished, the Harpoon will return to public view not as scattered parts in two cities, but as a single 1944 Navy bomber at the museum gate in Riverside. (vintageaviationnews.com)