Published March 2004

Paine Field center restores aviation history

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT First flown in 1959, this de Havilland Comet 4C was eventually donated to Everett Community College for its aviation school students, and then to the Museum of Flight. It’s now being restored in a multi-year program at Paine Field.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

Where do aviation museums’ old airplanes come from? How did they become rare and prized aviation exhibits, slices of world aviation history, reminders of world wars and dog-fighting victories, memories that make pilots’ hearts beat faster?

Glistening clean, colorfully painted and authentically restored, these historic planes attract and amaze people of all generations, bearing no traces of where they were found — at the bottom of Lake Washington, stuck in Alaskan mud flats or desert-dried in baking Arizona sunshine.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors to Seattle’s Museum of Flight each year marvel at the meticulously detailed and seemingly flight-ready appearance of the historic military and civilian aircraft on display — from a World War II Navy Corsair to a DC-3 airliner — without knowing whose hands and minds restored those rare treasures.

But Tom Cathcart and his cadre of some 250 volunteers at the museum’s Restoration Center at Paine Field don’t work for publicity. They simply love to restore classic aviation relics for the excitement of seeing world-famous aircraft returned to service, this time as historic icons of worldwide aviation history for museum visitors to enjoy.

“We have a dedicated team of volunteers with a variety of backgrounds and skills,” said Cathcart, the Museum of Flight’s chief of restoration. He’s the only full-time employee at the center, assisted by part-time staffer Sheree Van Berg. While volunteers do most of the work, project managers are sometimes hired to direct special restoration efforts, such as the long-term British Comet jetliner project headed by Jim Goodall and the FM-2 Wildcat restoration managed by Hank Puckett.

Since the center opened at Paine Field in 1988, some 20 restored aircraft have been sent to the Museum of Flight for display. Other planes are kept at the Everett facility as exhibits in Seattle change, Cathcart said.

In contrast to seeing the gleaming, polished and dusted aircraft on display in Seattle, walking into the restoration center is like stepping into a mechanic’s garage work area, with parts, tools and sections of aircraft bodies wall-to-wall. Numerous projects are under way at any particular time, each of them somewhere in various stages of multi-year resurrections that will transform them to their former factory-rollout condition.

Prominent among the aircraft in the main restoration hangar, one of two buildings used by the center, is a twin-engine Chance-Vought F7U-3 Cutlass. On display for 34 years at Berryman War Memorial Park in Bridgeport, Wash. — from 1958 to 1992 — the fighter plane is being restored to flying condition for the air museum.

Close by, a Grumman F4F — actually a General Motors FM-2 lookalike in this case — is taking shape as skilled volunteers led by Puckett piece together parts for the landing gear and the Navy carrier plane’s folding wings. The plane once flew combat missions in the battle for Okinawa. Eventually, it will join other World War II warbirds at the Museum of Flight’s new Personal Courage wing in Seattle.

“This work is a daunting experience for the volunteers because they see so little progress over a long period of time,” Cathcart said, “but they stick to it. Take the Comet, for instance. Near the end of its flying career, a New Mexico company bought the plane for charter flights, but nothing ever happened, so it was never licensed in the United States. Later it was purchased by Redmond Air, donated to Everett Community College and then passed on to us.

“When we got it, water had leaked into the hatches, leaving standing water in the fuselage. All the interior fabrics were unglued. It stank. You could hardly breath in there. We’ve made vast improvements in it over the last several years, including finishing the cockpit. Now we’re working our way back to the passenger cabin.”

A favorite with Museum of Flight visitors in Seattle is an F4U Corsair, now in sparkling condition. But dredging it up from a watery grave at the bottom of Lake Washington several years ago meant a nightmarish challenge for the Restoration Center crews.

Overall, the museum has more than 130 aircraft and spacecraft and more than 19,000 other aviation and aerospace artifacts, including planes, articles of apparel, engines, oral histories, radios, armament, tools and accessories.

This year, the museum added even more aircraft to its Seattle collection, including 25 historic WWI and WWII combat aircraft in the Champlin Fighter Collection on display in Arizona, owned by the Museum of Flight. Last year, the Arizona museum was closed and Cathcart organized and led the exodus of the collection to Seattle, including such well-known aircraft as a Curtiss P-40, Lockheed P-38, and a Messerschmitt Bf 109.

Those planes will join a British Spitfire and other planes in the Museum of Flight’s new Personal Courage wing, opening to the public June 6 in Seattle.

But while the Museum of Flight has been a major aerospace attraction to residents and tourists in the Northwest for many years, the staff at the Restoration Center at Paine Field has toiled quietly without much fanfare.

That’s changing. In recent years the busy workshop has added signage and walkways for visitors that allow tours without interrupting workers’ restoration efforts. Soon the presence of a new air museum at Paine Field will make the Restoration Center even better known.

“More than 500,000 visitors go through the Museum of Flight each year, and more than 9,000 visitors come through here, including busloads of students,” said Cathcart.

Visitors to the restoration facility are expected to increase dramatically in the next few years when Snohomish County’s new National Flight Interpretive Center is finished in early 2005, just across the field.

The new Paine Field air museum is expected to be managed and supplied with displays by the Museum of Flight, which expects upwards of 300,000 visitors to the museum each year. An additional draw at the NFIC will be a new Boeing Tour Center for visitors to the nearby Boeing 747, 767, 777 and 7E7 assembly plant.

The Museum of Flight’s Paine Field Restoration Center is open to the public Tuesdays through Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free, though donations are always welcomed. For more information on the Restoration Center, call 425-745-5150.

Back to the top/March 2004 Main Menu