Goodyear Aircraft built roughly 4,000 Corsairs in Akron during the war. One of them came home, and volunteers are rebuilding it in public view.
Most pilots know Goodyear from blimps and tires. Fewer know that during World War II, Goodyear Aircraft Corporation in Akron built fighters: roughly 4,000 Corsairs in three main variants (FG-1, FG-1A, FG-1D), license-built from Chance Vought's F4U design between 1943 and 1945, rolling out of the plant beside the great Airdock at what is now Akron Fulton (KAKR), the same field where the company built more than 130 airships. Marines flew Goodyear Corsairs across the Pacific, the British Fleet Air Arm flew them off carriers, and the bent-wing bird ended the war with an eleven-to-one kill ratio; the Japanese called it Whistling Death. Goodyear even built a hot-rod variant, the F2G Super Corsair, and one of them won the last Thompson Trophy race ever flown at Cleveland, in 1949.
One of Akron's own came home. FG-1D Bureau Number 76671, accepted by the Navy in January 1945, spent over sixty years as a display in Goodyear's World of Rubber museum. When the museum closed in August 2009, the cockpit went to the MAPS Air Museum at Akron-Canton (KCAK), ten miles south, where it sat on display until 2018, when the volunteers decided to build the entire airplane back around it. They are still at it, working from original factory drawings, and you can watch them do it. Two airports, ten miles apart, carry the legacy: the Airdock still stands over Fulton field, and the fighter Akron built is slowly taking shape again at Canton.