COLUMBUS, Ind. — Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum volunteers are continuing to inch closer to moving a C-119 “Flying Boxcar” aircraft the museum purchased last year to a display site near the Columbus Municipal Airport.
The 40,000-pound plane, which is not airworthy, was taken apart several months ago at an airport in Greybull, Wyoming, where the aircraft’s parts were loaded onto trucks and driven 1,460 miles to the Columbus Municipal Airport. The final pieces of the aircraft arrived in July.
The plane is in a hangar at the airport, where volunteers have completed painting parts of the interior of the plane, installing flight deck windows and repairing sheet metal in preparation for moving the plane to its display site just south of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II aircraft now on display near the museum, said Skip Taylor, a museum member who is co-leading the C-119 project.
Over the last several weeks, volunteers, along with the help of Force Construction, also have completed construction on the display site, Taylor said. Leaders of the project said they hope to pull the plane out of the hangar this month, install the tail boom and move it to the display site.
“As always, we’re a little optimistic,” Taylor said. “…We’re beginning to talk about the details of how we’re going to do that.”
However, the volunteers are on the lookout for wet weather, which could make the ground “too spongy” to move the aircraft, Taylor said. One issue of particular concern is that once the plane is taken out of the hangar and the tail booms are installed, it will be too big to move back inside the hangar.
“Part of what we have to do is pull (the aircraft) across some turf that’s in the area around where the display site is going to be,” Taylor said. “So we actually have to pull it across the turf, make a U-turn and then pull it back right onto where it’s supposed to be. And that will be a little delicate. We don’t want the ground out here to be too spongy when we do that.”
Renderings of the display site posted on the museum’s Facebook page show the plane facing northwest and placed diagonally across the site, pointing directly toward the Atterbury Bakalar Air Museum at 4742 Ray Boll Blvd. In addition, a sidewalk will loop around the aircraft and connect to an existing sidewalk that runs perpendicular to the boulevard.
When assembled, the C-119 will be considerably larger than the F-4 Phantom currently on display. The C-119 is about 86 feet long, has a 110-foot wingspan and is 27 feet tall at the tail. By comparison, the F-4 Phantom is about 58 feet long, 16.5 feet tall and has a wingspan of nearly 38.5 feet, according to the aircraft’s manufacturer.
Pat Billey, a museum member who is co-leading the project with Taylor, said the volunteers are working with a contractor “to help us get electrical service inside the plane” and avoid condensation from forming inside the aircraft.
Last week, volunteers looked samples of insulation for portions of the plane.
“If you want to use the inside of it, it’s going to be real cold in the wintertime or real hot in the summertime,” Taylor said. “We just don’t want this to be a walk-around display. We want the public to have an opportunity to experience the inside, too.”
Additionally, the volunteers are planning to lay commemorative bricks at the display site with the names of individuals who have made at least a $100 donation to the project.
As of last week, the volunteers had 98 commemorative bricks but they had not yet been put in place due to the cold weather, Taylor said.
The C-119, also known as the “Flying Boxcar” due to the unusual shape of its fuselage, was in service with the U.S. Air Force from 1947 to 1972 and was designed to carry cargo, personnel, litter patients and mechanized equipment. The aircraft was also used to drop cargo and troops using parachutes, according to the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum.
The Flying Boxcars were powered by two Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone radial engines, each with 3,500 horsepower, and could reach a maximum speed of 296 miles per hour.
The U.S. Air Force extensively used C-119s during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. Retired C-119s were also used as air tankers to fight wildfires in the United States.
The particular C-119 purchased by the museum was built in Hagerstown, Maryland, for the Canadian Air Force, Taylor said. The aircraft was later acquired by Hawkins & Powers and used to fight forest fires. Its last known flight was in 1990.
The Flying Boxcars are of particular historical significance to Columbus, according to museum volunteers. Here, the pilots referred to them as the “Dollar Nineteens,” according to museum records.
From 1957 to 1969, 36 C-119s for the 434th Troop Carrier Wing were stationed at Bakalar Air Force Base, which is now Columbus Municipal Airport. The C-119s were a staple in Columbus, flown out of the base longer than any other aircraft.
Manufacturers Fairchild and Kaiser built 1,151 of the C-119s from 1949 to 1955. However, only around 40 Flying Boxcars are still left today, most of them in museums across the country or in a scrap yard.
The Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum purchased the plane for $15,000 in 2019.
