Lost Bomber of World War II

Josh Gates joins the Fleet Air Arm Museum's restoration team on an audacious mission to rebuild a complete Fairey Barracuda—the revolutionary all-metal torpedo bomber that helped cripple the Nazi battleship Tirpitz in 1944, clearing the path for D-Day. The problem: of 2,600 Barracudas manufactured for the Royal Navy, not a single intact example survives today. The team's ambitious plan requires excavating tens of thousands of original components from crash sites and burial grounds, then reassembling them rivet by rivet. Gates travels from a former airfield in St Andrews, Scotland—where museum curator David Morris and local historian Archie Liggat investigate wartime accounts of Barracudas deliberately buried after the war—to the frigid waters near Alta, Norway, where he and researcher Frode Lindgjerdet search for wreckage from the historic Tirpitz raids.

The Barracuda represents a genuine gap in aviation history. While most World War II aircraft were preserved in museums as the jet age arrived, the Barracuda was overlooked in the postwar cleanup, leading to the complete extinction of a plane that played a crucial role in Allied victory. The episode delivers tangible discoveries: Gates and his teams uncover sheet aluminum and painted metal fragments at the Scottish airfield, then locate confirmed aircraft wreckage in Norwegian waters. What makes the quest compelling is its painstaking scope—the restoration team must locate and authenticate original parts scattered across two countries to complete what David Morris calls "the world's hardest jigsaw puzzle" and resurrect an aviation legend thought lost forever.