Several hundred pieces of a C-119 “Flying Boxcar” purchased by the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum have made it to Columbus.
The 40,000-pound plane, which was not airworthy, was taken apart over the past few months at an airport in Greybull, Wyoming.
The aircraft’s tail booms, engines and several hundred other parts were loaded onto a 26-foot box truck and 53-foot flatbed semi-truck last week and driven some 1,500-miles to Columbus.
Shortly before sunrise Monday, a group of around 15 air museum volunteers and other officials started unloading an estimated more than 8 metric tons of parts from the disassembled aircraft at Columbus Municipal Airport.
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The aircraft will be reassembled there, restored and put on public display just south of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II aircraft now on display.
The group of volunteers, with the help of airport officials, used a forklift and yellow tethers to lift two 2,000-pound tail booms and two 3,500-pound engines from the flatbed semi-truck, with the airplane parts, at one point, hanging several feet in the air.
After lifting the parts one by one from the semi trailer, the forklift driver, along with around six to eight volunteers walking with the forklift to keep the parts from sliding around or colliding with objects, drove the parts around 180 feet to a storage facility on the airport property.
The aluminum tail booms were around 38 feet long and 6-feet in diameter, said Skip Taylor, a museum member who is leading the C-119 project. The engines were 8-feet tall and 6- to 7-feet in diameter.
It took around an hour for the volunteers to remove the first tail boom from the trailer and move it into the storage facility. Overall, the volunteers spent around four hours on Monday morning unloading all the parts, Taylor said.
“Usually, these things are learning curves,” Taylor said. “You learn how you are going to hook it up with the equipment you have. …Clearly, that first boom was a challenge. The second biggest challenge was getting the jet engine out of the (box) truck. It weighs 3,000 pounds. We had to use two fork lifts to ultimately get it out.”
Hundreds of parts
In addition to the engines and tail booms, the volunteers unloaded several hundred other parts from the box truck, including about 1,000 pounds of airplane tires, Taylor said.
Museum officials hope to have the entire aircraft in Columbus later this month or early April, said Nick Firestone, Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum Board president.
Several of the items that were placed in the back of the storage facility included a tag that identified the part by name and identification numbers, said David Day, a member of the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum board.
“What they did (in Wyoming) was they tagged the parts,” Day said while holding one of the tags. “It’s almost like IKEA furniture.”
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, 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 aircraft, when assembled, is about 86-feet long, has a 110-foot wingspan and is 27-feet tall at the tail. 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.
Historical significance
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.
“They had a reserve unit here in Columbus for 20 years. Over the 20 years, thousands of guys went through there helping to fulfill their service contract and this was the airplane that was here most of the time,” Day said. “If you’re going to have a monument to these guys, what better monument than have one of their airplanes parked out front. This kind of memorializes all the work and effort that these guys put in over the years.”
Manufacturers Fairchild and Kaiser built 1,151 of the C-119s from 1949 to 1955. However, only about 40 Flying Boxcars are still left today, most of them in museums across the country or in a scrap yard, Firestone said in an earlier interview.
The Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum purchased the plane for $15,000 this past May.
That same month, the museum launched a crowdfunding campaign sponsored by the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, and raised $50,034 to disassemble and transport the plane to Columbus, according to the campaign’s website.
The project also received a $50,000 matching grant from the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority’s CreatINg Places program, the state’s crowdfunding grant program.
“We have to clean things up,” Taylor said. “Then we have to do some identification. The people (in Wyoming) were pretty good about identifying the parts. We’ll make positive identification of them and move them across the way to another hangar on the other side (of Columbus Municipal Airport), and that’s where we’re going to put most of it together.”
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Visit atterburybakalarairmuseum.org/project-charlie-119.html for more information about the project.
People interesting in volunteering for the project should visit the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum, located at 4742 Ray Boll Blvd., and fill out a volunteer form.
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