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Originally Posted by Hottentot
I understood what he meant, thank you very much.
Every time you restore an aircraft, you make choices like that. Sometimes it sparks an outrage, like the rumor of BW-372 getting painted in Navy colors in which it never served. Sometimes it's more subtle like removing the red star from a P-39 that saw use in Russia. And on everyday case it's covering the marks that make the object an individual object and thus a museum piece.
Take this plane, for example. It's a plane which by the looks of it was shot down. It's a question of if it's going to be treated as such, or made a generic Dornier 17 to represent all Dornier 17s. As the article says "the propellers clearly show the damage inflicted during the bomber's fateful final landing, experts have said". Are they going to repair that damage? How about any marks of the battle that took place before the plane's fate?
This plane has a story. By restoring it they can either honor it or ignore it. I hope they go with the former, because as an object without a story it would be not much more than a lawn ornament.
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Under, what I would call normal circumstances, the aircraft in question is "restored" to what it looked like the day it went down. However, there is a difference between "fixing up" and "restoring". Restoring anything means returning it back to what is was like out of the factory. Doing anything is modifying...to the purest. However, planes have a different appeal when "restored" to the unit it was from. Pictures of the battle damage are enough to tell it's story. A museum will only spend so much. For me, spending anything on it at all is enough for me to be glad it was pulled from the depths and but on display.