Aviation Restoration

Planes come to the Southern Museum of Flight in all conditions, from a well-cared-for Blue Angels jet to a B-25 bomber pulled from the bottom of the lake.

For daily maintenance and intensive restoration projects, Museum Executive Director Brian Barsanti calls on a corps of 15 to 30 volunteers that includes ex-military members, businessmen and a variety of people interested in being able to “tinker” with the planes. They supplement the museum’s 10 paid staff members in keeping their roughly 100 historic planes in display condition.

Barsanti said there are a number of volunteers who work as educators, docents and other roles in the Museum of Flight, but the volunteers who work in the shop behind the museum have to have some specialized mechanical knowledge to rebuild and keep planes — from homebuilt crafts and the earliest days of aviation to modern jets — historically accurate.

“It takes knowledge … from the types of paint that you use to the anti-corrosive materials that you put on these things,” Barsanti said.

Particularly for planes that were abandoned or sent to scrapyards before coming to the museum, Barsanti said having a group of people dedicated to their care has visible results. 

“I’d say a majority of them look better than how they did when they came in,” Barsanti said of the planes.

On a day-to-day basis, volunteers and museum staff keep up with general maintenance, paint and the wear and tear of time. Their current location at 4343 73rd St. N. has insufficient indoor space to house 100 items as sizeable as fighter jets and helicopters, so a large part of the collection is housed outside. The museum’s SR-71 Blackbird, for instance, “would not even fit in our largest hangar” and must be displayed outside.

Barsanti said that additional environmental wear makes it even harder to keep up with maintenance.

“It’s a constant face-lift process,” Barsanti said. “The problem that the outdoor aircraft poses now is it sits blocks away from us. Sheer logistics, it doesn’t make good sense for us.”

When a new plane comes in, it becomes a project all its own. With a plane like the Museum of Flight’s new Blue Angel jet, Barsanti said minimal restoration work was needed, though they will have to match the exact parts, paint colors, decals and markings for historical authenticity. 

One recent difficult project was a Korean War-era jet taken from the former Banks High School, where generations of students had painted the jet for homecoming weeks spanning decades, Barsanti said.

“When it went through its process of paint being stripped, I had never seen so many layers of paint on one particular item. And you could literally count the layers of red and blue and green and gold and white. You’re talking years and years of this happening,” Barsanti said. “That was probably the second worst [restoration project], but it was funny at the same time because we got to hear all the stories and learn about the culture.”

Even after the paint was stripped, Barsanti said restoration was a challenge. Finding the right parts for a plane built for the Korean War is much harder than modern day planes.

“Here you have this jet from the 1950s, and we set out to restore it. Well, one of the bits of vandalism that was perpetrated on the plane was someone drove a 2x4 through the canopy that covers where the pilot sits in the cockpit. So trying to find a canopy for an F-86 Korean War-era is not the easiest thing,” Barsanti said.

The Museum of Flight staff also has to choose when to restore a plane and when to simply preserve it in its present condition. One example of this decision is the museum’s a pair of B-25 bombers, flown by the Tuskegee Airmen while training for WWII, on display. 

The first B-25 was in reasonably good condition and restored by museum staff and volunteers to its WWII-era condition. The second, however, had crashed in a lake during a training run and had sat underwater for decades before being rescued. The damage and corrosion on that bomber was very severe, Barsanti said.

“We found that there was just no way to really restore this plane … so we determined that would be preserved in its natural state,” Barsanti said. “It would have been cheaper to build a new B-25 bomber.”

Rather than restoring it, the Museum of Flight instead built an exhibit where the B-25’s rusted fuselage appears to still rest on the bottom of the lake. The exhibit includes information on the training run that led to the bomber’s crash, as well as the complicated efforts to lift it from the lakebed.

“We see it as a nice homecoming for the plane,” he said.

The Museum of Flight’s plans for the future include a move from its spot by the airport to a property near the Barber Motorsports Park. Barsanti said the move would give about four times the space of the museum’s current facility, allowing a larger hangar to move more of its planes to indoor displays, as well as outdoor areas that could include a landscaped, park-like area with outdoor plane displays, hiking trails and possibly an amphitheatre.

“When you’re talking about tens of thousands of pounds of metal and moving them around, it can be quite a challenge to keep things fresh and new and lively,” Barsanti said. “They’re large items. There’s limited space indoors.”

In November, the Birmingham City Council approved an industrial park project near Barber that includes 24 acres, donated by U.S. Steel, for the Museum of Flight. The construction would be done in three phases over the next three to five years, and the Museum of Flight will be responsible for raising the money to build the new facility.

Barsanti said a more specific timeline for the Museum of Flight to move into its new home has not been nailed down, but the future plans of the museum are “really hinging” on facilities expansion.

“We were hampered by space, and we can’t grow and expand in our current location. There’s physically nowhere to go,” he said.