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| Web-Only Feature: Nebraska's museum's air space an impressive review. |
SUDDENLY, we’re soaring deep into the late 1950s, blazing to the edge of the stratosphere as we fly above the Soviet Union in America’s U-2 spy plane, feeling the heat of a feared missile launch during the biggest chill of the Cold War. Then we take off again, just months after the devastation at Pearl Harbor. We fly on with these gallant sky knights, riding B-25 bombers in the Doolittle Raid, as U.S. pilots strike back with a daredevil mission over Japan.
Those images and many more have been polished back to life at the Strategic Air and Space Museum near Ashland. These aging aircraft warriors look young again thanks to a dedicated squadron of workers that has the right stuff.
EACH TIME Duane Dilts pushed on his chisel, another fleck of green paint about half the size of his small fingernail fluttered from a piece of aluminum to the concrete floor below. Dilts braced himself in the open bomb bay of a big B-29, a four-engine bomber, similar to its brethren that took the U.S. fight to Japan during World War II.
He is scraping away so fresh paint can be applied to make the aircraft shine like it did when built in mid-1945. Then it will be rolled into one of the two huge display hangars, joining 29 other aircraft cared for by about 40 men and women volunteers of the museum’s restoration crew, a team that Dilts helps supervise.
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“This is what I’ll do today,” said Dilts, his voice muffled by a dust mask. “Just this one rib.”
He chiseled around wire cables still taut more than half a century after the plane last flew. Although that slender piece of metal was just one of thousands forming the frame of the 99-foot-long airplane, progress in restoring aircraft is measured in tiny bits. Together, all these bits of effort will make this plane look as if it has just arrived from being assembled at its plant in Georgia.
The Strategic Air and Space Museum is just over a long runway’s length from the sleepy little city of Ashland, near Interstate 80 and the Eugene T. Mahoney State Park, and houses impressive aircraft like the C-47, a twin-engine cargo/troop carrier that may have touched down on every nation on earth since its first mission in 1935.
A short distance from Dilts, 80-year-old Bill Schaffhausen guided a whirring pneumatic sander across the wing of a dart-like, Soviet-built MiG-21, one of the scourges of U.S. pilots during the Vietnam War. Wearing respirator masks, the Lincoln resident and his restoration comrade, Stan Olsen, were stripping a tough coating from the jet.
“Then we’ll use finer stuff and polish the plane,” Schaffhausen said. “It will look like very bright, new metal, and after that, we’ll paint on the red stars.”
And speaking of comrades, after he worked on the plane’s tail, Olsen joked about how he was lovingly caring for a fighter flown by America’s archenemy when he joined the Air Force in 1957.
“If anyone had told me then that I’d be working on a Russian airplane when I’m 72, I would have thought we had lost the war!” Olsen, a La Vista resident, later shouted with a laugh away from the noise.
In the main display hangar and inside the tight confines of a B-47, Chuck Karrick twisted himself around as he installed the finishing touches of a complete restoration of the crew compartment in what was the nation’s first all-jet swept wing bomber
“It’s a struggle to work in here,” said Karrick, of Omaha. “The pilot had to be an acrobat to get into his seat.”
Almost every day, someone from the restoration crew is working on an aircraft. Some have been completely restored. Others are works-in-progress, while several still await a restorer’s first magic touch.
“We try to restore the aircraft as close as possible to their original appearance,” said Tom York, the museum’s director of operations, who’s in charge of its restoration projects.
You’ve read about the impressive aircraft and passionate volunteers of Ashland’s Strategic Air and Space Museum in the March/April issue of Nebraska Life Magazine. Now uncover the unique history, founding and funding of the museum itself in Mike Whye's article, Nebraska's museum's air space an impressive review.
