I've been away from the museum for about a month, and my gosh, what on Earth has been going on there! Let me count the ways:
1. The B-17 is out of the museum. Not exactly "gone" -- it is now sitting outside, behind the building across the highway from the museum that once housed the headquarters for Evergreen Aviation. From what I understand, it's just waiting for a pilot (presumably the same one who flew the P-38 away) to fly it out of there.
2. The Corsair has been sold and is gone. The same fate awaits the Mustang. Absolutely, utterly unbeknownst to me, the "Falls Event Center," which bought some of the property at the museum in a bankruptcy sale, and has henceforth established the museum as one of its "Falls Event Center" meeting facilities, also bought TWELVE AIRPLANES as part of the deal, and they haven't wasted much time selling at least the first two of them. Here is how I found out -- in an article from the Portland Oregonian:
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/inde ... green.htmlAnd yes, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation is part of the whole story. Talk about a business partner that Evergreen did NOT need!
3. So, there is quite a bit of upheaval at the museum. However, they have plenty of planes to fill its museum buildings with. I was there this morning as they were moving their Consolidated PBY Catalina into the main museum building. The DC-3 had been moved to the space where the B-17 had been, and the Catalina was moved into the space where the DC-3 had been. The museum has two smaller "flying boat" aircraft, which were moved under the Catalina's wings. There were quite a few other moves that had already been made -- it appeared that one area was filled with "scout aircraft," the WWII planes were in one general area, and a lot of the homebuilt aircraft had been moved out of the building. The latter was fine with me -- by all means, let them get some of the far more significant aircraft that have been wasting away outdoors into the museum, instead of a dozen homebuilt planes. And so on.
Of course, I took pictures, but it'll take another day or two to get some processed and posted -- I'll definitely give you a look at things as I saw them today. But that's the story for now, as I understand things.