WESTON, Fla. (AP) -- A highly decorated fighter pilot who lost sight in one eye in a plane crash during World War II has finally received the disability payments he has sought for 50 years.

Frank Fong, 86, will receive a lump sum of $67,000 next month for injuries suffered in a 1944 crash over Germany, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs said Tuesday.

Last week, the Veteran Appeals Board granted the disability payments for blindness in Fong's left eye for the period from July 1950 to August 1997. The VA denied a claim Fong filed in 1950 because a VA doctor did not diagnose the scar on his retina and the flight-surgeon records of the accident weren't in his military file.

In 1998, the VA acknowledged the crash caused the scarring and blindness and granted him monthly payments, but only authorized payments retroactive one year to 1997.

Fong said he was upset that the back pay doesn't include interest: "Keeping us waiting this long, they should pay us in today's dollars."

Fong said doctors during the war were willing to overlook the blindness in one eye so that he could keep flying after his P-47 Thunderbolt crashed in the spring of 1944. Fong had been flying low to strafe locomotives when his plane skimmed a small hill and crashed. Shards of his sunglasses lodged in his left eye.

The Army had initially rejected Fong for flight school because of his Chinese ancestry, but he became a pilot and went on to earn two Distinguished Flying Crosses, eight air medals, a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.