The last of them sit on the tarmac up for sale at the Fredericton Airport. Their story is still not over and what a story they can tell before they move on. They are old war birds that served on many different fronts seeing their first action in 1942 in the Pacific. They were called the Avenger, to avenge the losses at Pearl Harbor. Built to attack ships and submarines, these planes could fly farther, faster and carry more than their predecessors. They were touch enough to bounce down hard on carrier decks and often made it home damaged.

When that war was over, many of the planes eventually found their way to northern New Brunswick where another war was being waged, this one against the spruce budworm. This pest with its ferocious appetite could wipe out a forest of balsam and spruce trees. In a province where more than half of the people depended on forestry for a living, the government feared the devastating losses it could face with this new invasion. So a decision was made to spray the affected areas with chemicals.

The very qualities that served the military in wartime made the Avenger the ideal plane to take on the spruce budworm. It could carry heavy loads of pesticides, fly low at high speeds, take off short runways in the middle of the forest and survive tough landings. When the spray program ended, these planes continued to serve New Brunswick forests putting out fires. But their work days are over and now the last of them are up for sale.

Land & Sea visits the pilots who have come to love this tough, reliable plane to hear a different kind of war story that is seldom told. We also see the efforts in which some of these retired pilots are engaged restoring one of these planes that had crashed on the edge of a river in 1975. This is a tale of love of a bygone era.