Some people decorate their yards with garden gnomes or plastic pink flamingos. But Eric van der Voort wanted to make a grander statement, which is saying a lot, since the guy owns a pair of World War II anti-aircraft searchlights.

So Voort perched a fiberglass replica of a Flying Tigers P-40 fighter plane on the deck behind his Kaimuki home. He only has the front half, but with its red propeller cone and a distinctive shark’s mouth painted on its nose, the plane is an imposing decoration that likely gave H-1 commuters a start when it showed up in December.

The 53-year Voort, who owns a convention set-building company, can’t explain why he did it.

“I just have things nobody else has,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s what I do.”

Voort isn’t exaggerating, either. He has two military trucks, those vintage searchlights — which beamed over Kaneohe last Halloween — and he once hung the fiberglass shell of a drag racer from the ceiling of a warehouse he leased in Kapalama. When he lost the warehouse space, Voort considered hanging the dragster on a wall outside his home.

“I had a hard time getting rid of that,” said Voort, who ended up putting it in a trash bin several times before giving it to a guy from Maui.

The Flying Tigers P-40, which is about 20 percent smaller than the real thing, came from the Pacific Aviation Museum on Ford Island, where it served as a background prop for a souvenir photo company. But the company folded and left the plane behind until January 2015, when Voort took it home.

“They were throwing it away,” said Voort, who was working on an exhibit at the aviation museum at the time. “I said, ‘I love that and I’ll take it. And when I finish my deck, I will bolt it onto the deck overlooking the freeway.’”

It’s already become a landmark easily seen from the Koko Head Avenue overpass. Friends have called: Is that a plane? A Japanese tourist knocked on Voort’s front door and, in broken English, asked if he could take photographs.

Naturally, Voort has also imagined what it would be like to have the back half of a Flying Tigers P-40 sticking out of the other side of his home.

But he doesn’t have one — yet.