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 details of how we’re going to do that.”
For more on this story, see Tuesday’s Republic.
