The Swoose, restoration.

Like thousands of other B-17s, The Swoose was caught in the rush to disarm, ending up at the extensive War Assets Administration facility at Kingman, Arizona, slated to be melted down for its aluminium. At this point, March 1946, Colonel Frank Kurtz persuaded the City of Los Angeles to retrieve the bomber for use as a war memorial, with the bomber arriving at Los Angeles Municipal Airport on 6 April 1946. Kurtz piloted the aircraft on what was at the time described as her last flight.^[4] Three years later, however, the city still had not found an appropriate place to display the historic airframe, so in January 1949 it was donated by the city fathers to the National Air Museum in Washington, D.C. Refurbished at March Air Force Base, Riverside, California, for its delivery flight to Washington, it was flown by Kurtz with National Air Museum curator Paul E. Garber aboard to their storage facility at Park Ridge, Illinois, arriving on 26 March 1949. In January 1950 it was flown to Pyote Air Force Base, Pyote, Texas, for additional long-term storage, and again in December 1953 it was airborne one final time, flying to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, arriving there 5 December 1953 on just three engines.