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Check out these production numbers of various planes from WWII:

Source is Wikipedia.

USA:
B-29 = 3970
P51 Mustang all variants = over 15,000
B-17 = 12,731

Britain:
Spitfire = 20,351
Hawker Hurricanes = 14,533
Avro-Lacaster = 7,377

Deutschland:
ME-109 = 33,984
FW-190 = over 20,000
ME-262 = 1,430
Stuka = Estimated 6,500

Japan:
Zero = 10,939

Obviously that’s a short list of all the planes that were built but considering the incredible numbers of planes built, how many are flying today or even in a static display?
From: http://www.johnweeks.com/b17active/index.html

There are 15 B-17’s left flying or static display although didn’t we just lose one?

I’ve only seen one ME-262 and that was at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum and I think Britain has at least one.

The prospect of finding so many Spitfires is a miracle.

Then, there was the B-29 that landed on the ice and a group was working to replace the engines and fly it out and it was part of a documentary. They actually had it taxiing after all four engines were replaced and then the APU wasn’t properly installed and it burned the plane to the ground. It was a tragic loss and a horrible end to the documentary. I’ve only seen it once though. I think they didn’t even recover the engines they had just put on and I think while they were taxiing it, they ended up over a frozen lake so in summer, they figured the remains would end up on the bottom of the lake. I don’t know why the didn’t recover the engines, they looked like they survived. Maybe they were just too depressed to have come so close and have it all go up in smoke in 5 minutes?

I agree that with CNC’s, they can probably produce what they need. I don’t know about rubber parts and things like gaskets and whether they kept the spares they manufactured. Seeing as how they decommissioned so many planes, I don’t know why they’d keep the spares but they did for the Merlin V-12. I guess they were still using the engine and we used P-51s at the outbreak of the Korean war.

I can’t wait to see the shape of these planes after so many years. I guess it wasn’t just Saddam who buried planes...

It is a miracle to find these aircraft, but because there were thousands and thousands of them made, and because the country and economy quickly switched to peacetime, and of course because the Air Force (soon to be Air Force) and Navy were quickly dropping lots of these aircraft for those spiffy looking jets, so many were lost to the scrap dealers. Lot of good metals tied up in those aircraft.

There was a feller who managed to save a lot of the nose art for a bunch of bombers and donated it - he cut the parts off the aircraft that looked interesting to him, but even then they sat around in his barn, even in the open, for many years.

In hindsight, everybody would have made sure to preserve a lot more aircraft than they did, because I doubt anybody thought that the armed forces and scrap dealers would be able to dispose of so many of them so quickly.