Mon Dec 10, 2007 9:41 am
Flying Leathernecks want to expand: Marine aviation museum set for big push in 2008
By: JIM TRAGESER - North County Times
MIRAMAR - It's not much to look at, not now. A couple of portable buildings and several dozen old airplanes and helicopters parked behind a chain-link fence on the north side of the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.
But behind the sleepy facade at the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum are big dreams - and the kind of solid planning needed to bring them about.
If things go the way the staff and volunteers with the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum are planning, in five years' time the portable structures will be replaced by a state-of-the-art museum building that will house many of the museum's most historic aircraft - as well as a Marine aviation research archive and library.
The Flying Leatherneck Historical Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that raises funds for and runs the museum on behalf of the Marine Corps, has already commissioned architectural site plans for the proposed building.
Next month, the foundation will submit those plans to the Department of the Navy for approval. If approved - and the Marines' support for the museum is both obvious and of long standing - the foundation will begin raising money to build the new facility. Representatives of the foundation said they expect the expansion to cost in the range of $20 million to $40 million, but said they are waiting for official approval before generating a final cost estimate in order to have as accurate a figure as possible.
This private-sector effort to build a professional-caliber museum to house historic Marine aircraft and the tens of thousands of documents that go with them is pulling in some big names.
Former Marine pilots Ed McMahon and Jerry Coleman are lending their star power to the Flying Leatherneck expansion plans.
McMahon served as Johnny Carson's announcer for more than three decades on "The Tonight Show" and also flew in World War II and Korea. In a recent telephone interview, he said he's glad to help the Flying Leatherneck Historical Foundation because the West Coast is the proper location for such a museum.
"It's logical that it's right here on the gateway where so many Marines left to fight in the Pacific," McMahon said.
Coleman, the longtime hall of fame radio announcer for the San Diego Padres who also saw combat as a Marine pilot in both World War II and Korea, stressed the importance of having a museum devoted to Marine aviation.
"It's the only one of its kind in the country," he said by phone last week. "There's no flying leatherneck museum anywhere else; they have a couple of planes here and there. They don't have a consolidation of all the Marine aircraft."
And that is the mission of the Flying Leathernecks, according to ret. Maj. Gen. Bob Butcher, chairman of the foundation's board and himself a veteran combat pilot: They want to have at least one example of every airplane that was ever part of the Marine Corps' arsenal.
They don't have them all yet; Coleman lamented that the museum doesn't have a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber, the plane he flew in World War II. And Butcher said the museum has almost no planes from before World War II.
But the several dozen planes in the museum's collection do represent a pretty substantial portion of the Corps' aviation history. From the distinctively gull-winged F4U Corsair fighter from World War II up through a contemporary McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet attack fighter, more than six decades of Marine aviation are already on display.
Marine aviation
While primarily an infantry force, Marines have been flying into combat for nearly as long as their colleagues in the Navy and Army Air Corps/Air Force. Marine aviation began in May, 1912, when 1st Lt. Alfred A. Cunningham reported for flight training with the Navy.
By the end of World War I, Marine pilots had seen combat action flying both fighters and bombers, plus anti-submarine reconnaissance flights. During World War II, Marine pilots were an integral part of the Pacific theater effort, with Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington one of the most famous fighter aces of the war. The exploits of Boyington's "Black Sheep Squadron" inspired a TV show in the 1970s.
Marines continue to fly front-line ground support and fighter aircraft today, and there is always one Marine pilot in the Navy's famed Blue Angels flight demonstration team.
Both Coleman and Butcher explained that the mission and nature of Marine aviation has always differed from that of the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Army - which operates small observation planes as well as combat helicopters. While the Navy and Air Force have many different kinds of combat missions, for the Marines, every combat air mission is in support of the troops on the ground. Unlike their colleagues in the other services, Marine pilots are also trained as infantry officers. Those differences add a different urgency to those ground-support missions for Marine pilots, Coleman and Butcher agreed.
As Coleman put it, "If you can't put a bomb within 200 feet of the target, you can take your own troops out."
Building a museum
Yet, Coleman said, there has never been a world-class museum devoted to Marine aviation.
The Navy has the National Museum of Naval Aviation at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida - which does have numerous exhibits about Marine aviation, as the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy. The Air Force has the Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Both of these military museums have the type of professional-caliber exhibit halls and educational signage and plaques one would expect at any top-tier museum, and rival private aviation museums such as the National Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Flight in Seattle or the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park.
That type of museum is what Butcher and his team are aiming for.
The Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum was started at the now-decommissioned Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Orange County in 1989. When El Toro was shuttered by the Base Realignment and Closure Committee in 1999, the museum moved south with the Marines once the Navy vacated Miramar, and the museum has been at its present location off Miramar Road on the north side of the base ever since.
With almost 8 acres immediately east of its current location designated for the museum's expansion by the base commander, and the architectural plans readied, Butcher said the time is ripe to take the Flying Leatherneck Aviation Museum to the next level.
Beyond getting ready to raise the tens of millions of dollars that will be needed to build the new museum, the foundation is also laying the groundwork to secure a solid financial future. As the museum itself is owned by the government, the staff is not able to charge for admission - and so the architects were asked to create a museum space that could also be used for banquets and conventions. The resulting plans allow the aircraft displays to be wheeled outside to create an indoor convention/banquet space for 1,500 people. Butcher said the foundation foresees renting the museum out at least on a weekly basis to help cover the operational costs.
"Keeping a museum up and running is expensive," he said.
But all of that awaits approval by the Department of the Navy; Butcher said he's not even accepting donations toward the new building yet.
"I can't in good conscience go out and ask for money until we're approved by the Navy."
For more information, contact the Flying Leatherneck Historical Foundation at (858) 693-1723.