Final Flight: The Story of a WWII Corsair

[0:10] Well, the exhibit is an incredible tribute to uh the sacrifice that uh our uncle made um for this country, you know, for our family. It's just uh incredibly u valuable to have him remembered in this way.

[0:23] Okay. So, the project really didn't have that uh human element to it without knowing anything about the pilot. So we kind of used a lot of uh standard family search uh mechanisms to kind of find out more about Lauren Eley. It's a very long story but eventually we found a living nephew and connection with the family turned up to be quite surprising because the family uh had a lot of stories to tell. They had a lot of artifacts. They had a lot of possessions of Lauren.

[0:50] Well, I I would want them to know that he was um um willing to do this, willing to sacrifice at the age of 21 years to to go through the kind of training that he went through to become a naval aviator and to put himself on the line like that. Um again, u there were thousands of other guys that did the same thing, but to look back at that time in history and understand how important that all was um and that he did it was quite uh would be quite a an honor to our family and has been um all these years. But now to have him recognized like this is is uh almost like icing on the cake to this

[1:32] wreckage is the most powerful and intimate connection that we could possibly have to our uncle. This is a really important exhibit for I think everybody to see because it's not just about the the wartime uh the airplanes that flew from Intrepid and the missions they flew, but this is a real personal human interest story. This is this is about a young man of only 20 21 22 years of age and the sacrifice that he made.