Nine Thousand Thunderbolts

Republic Aviation moved into Farmingdale on Long Island in 1939, taking over the old Seversky Aircraft factory that had been bleeding money for a decade. The new owners had a design that Seversky never quite cracked: a single-engine fighter built around the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, an 18-cylinder radial that put out 2,000 horsepower at takeoff. They called it the P-47 Thunderbolt. Everyone else called it the Jug.

The first XP-47 flew in May 1941. By December 1941, the United States was at war and Republic's order book exploded. The Farmingdale plant ramped from a few dozen workers to 24,000 in eighteen months. They built a second factory in Evansville, Indiana to keep up. Between September 1942 and the end of production in 1945, Republic delivered 15,683 Thunderbolts; 9,087 of them rolled out of the Farmingdale doors and rolled directly onto the Republic ramp for ferry delivery to the Army Air Forces.

The math: by V-E Day, roughly 30% of every fighter aircraft defending American positions in the European Theater had been built at the field that is now KFRG. P-47s flew the bulk of long-range escort missions before the P-51 became available in numbers. They strafed German rail, hunted V-1 launch sites, killed tanks during the Falaise pocket. The R-2800 and the Republic airframe built a reputation for bringing wrecked airplanes home.

The factory closed after the war. Republic kept building aircraft at Farmingdale through the F-105 Thunderchief era, the Cold War nuclear strike fighter that bombed North Vietnam; and finally shut down production in 1987. The American Airpower Museum took over the original Republic hangars on the south side of the field, where they restore and fly a P-47D, a P-51, and a TBM Avenger from the WWII production line. The hangars themselves are listed on the National Register.

Land at Farmingdale and you're landing on the field where the war over Europe was substantially won.