B-25 ¡Panchito! | Blind Bat News

U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Madeline Herzog, 02APR2022.

Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, 02APR2022.

Panchito = A derogatory name

New Jersey Air National Guard photo by Technical Sergeant Matt Hecht, 14MAY2016.

Panchito is a North American B-25J-25-NC Mitchell built in the last year of World War Two. Through the 1950s it was used for training. In the 1960s it became water bomber ‘Tanker 32’. In the early 1970s it was a bug sprayer called Big Bertha. Since the mid-70s it was a museum bird, finally becoming Panchito in the late 1990s. That information pertains to the specific aircraft currently flying, the original Panchito flew bombing missions over Okinawa during the summer of 1945, and then was apparently buried in a Filipino ‘grave’, with a whole bunch of taxpayer funded aircraft, when the war ended.

USAF video report from June 2007, about Panchito:

In 1981, Monogram Models Incorporated issued their fine 1:48 scale B-25J Mitchell kit, with markings for the original Panchito (which has a different tail code than today’s Panchito). Unfortunately Monogram didn’t include any historical info about the plane (except for a small blurb on the side of the box-top).