No. of Recommendations: 3
To view the place where the plane used to be…… now there’s a winning strategy.
Actually, you can't. The hangar door that you see in the two videos of the 17, are in "Hangar One", which is on the west side of the airport, next to where the bomber plant was. "Hangar One" was condemned a few years ago, because it's WWII structure violates too many building codes, and it was uneconomic to renovate. The museum built a new hangar, on the east side of the field. I understood the need, so I kicked a few hundred into that project too.
Here's an example of how that museum wastes money. An air museum at the former Chanute Field, in Rantoul, Illinois, went toes up some years ago. Other museums swarmed over the bones, taking planes from the dead museum's collection. The smaller aircraft, that were in the hanger, were quickly snapped up, as they were in decent cosmetic condition, and don't cost a fortune to move. The aircraft outside, battered and weathered, and big, were left. Enter the Yankee Air Museum. Rantoul is about a 6 hour drive from metro Detroit. The board members could have piled into a couple cars, driven to Rantoul, and checked in to a Motel 6. The next morning, they could look over what was available, then drive back to Detroit. But no, they flew down, in the museum's B-25. How much did that cost? And what did they snag? An EC-121, a radar picket conversion of a Lockheed Constellation, four engine airliner. It cost them $200,000 to have a specialist company disassemble the plane, truck the sections to the museum, and bolt the thing back together. Then the museum started leaning, hard, on it's supporters for money to restore the thing. This was at the same time that the museum was crying for money for the bomber plant project. So shipping the 121 to the museum both took money away from the bomber plant project, and gave them another money sink, in one stroke. When the museum was bragging about their acquisition on their Facebook page, I pointed out "you don't have a museum to show it in", as their current building is far too small. I challenged museum director Keven Walsh about the wisdom of what they did. He said words to the effect "we made brownie points with the Navy" as the Navy still owns the plane. I let it go, at that point. As I said, that bunch doesn't have the discipline to organize a trip to the head.
Oh, and a few years later, they announced they had changed their mind, and were abandoning the bomber plant project, after flushing over $10M of their supporters money away on it. Then started dunning people for money for their next bright idea.
Then they changed the name of the place, for the second time in ten years. How much does all the lawyer time and doc fees cost to change the name? Why? More waste?
That place is dead to me now.
Steve
