Warbird Information Exchange

The sound of grinders and an air-powered sander working across the bare silver aluminum body of a 1950s-era fighter plane filled the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum hangar.

The metallic Bondo-like material used for patching small holes created an airborne dust cloud surrounding Nip Parson, who worked on a few spots in the tail section as other volunteer workers prepared the top and belly of the F9F-8 Cougar’s fuselage for a fresh, period-correct paint job.

“This morning I was riveting and patching holes,” Parson said. “This afternoon I’ll be sanding.

“You should’ve seen this thing before it got to this point. It was a piece of junk.”

When the aircraft restoration is complete, HAMM members plan to display the Korean War-era plane along Texas Highway 64 to attract visitors.

The airplane arrived at the hangar in pieces. It was gifted to the museum by the city of Corpus Christi, which had decided to scrap the plane. The wings were cut off with cutting torches, and forklift forks had punched holes in the fuselage while moving the pieces.

Museum volunteers were in Rio Hondo to pick up a Catalina PBY, the HAMM’s mascot, and found the fighter plane’s remnants sitting in overgrown grass.

Rather than let the plane go to the scrap yard, the volunteers requested it be handed over as a restoration project.

Volunteer crews began working on the plane off-and-on for four years, volunteer and retired Air Force pilot Chip Williams said, but ramped up efforts to complete the restoration in the past two years.

A major accomplishment was reattaching the wings. Engineer John Conaway designed wing mounts that could support the 1,000-pound wings, Williams said. The rest of the project required addressing years of corrosion and holes.

Williams said there are too many patches to add the plane to the stable of 15 aircraft on loan to or owned by the museum. There are 13 of the planes showcased on the ramp outside the museum for public viewing.

Instead, the museum will mount the F9F-8 Cougar on a pole being designed by The University of Texas at Tyler engineering students as a display to attract visitors to the museum. Williams said the plane will be displayed in an upward climb as if taking off so that drivers coming from Tyler on Texas Highway 64 would see the top of the plane and drivers coming from the west would see its belly.

“It’s amazing the number of people who visit the museum who say they’ve lived in Tyler for years and never knew the museum was here,” Louis Thomas, the museum’s board president, said. “This will catch their eye and hopefully draw more visitors to the museum.”

Thomas said visits to the museum are steady but not in the numbers they would like for a city of 100,000. He said the displays of militaria at the HAMM is world-class and on par or better than bigger museums around the country.

There’s no shortage of good, quality military pieces at the museum but there is a shortage of space for an extensive collection of items in storage. He’s hopeful more visitors would translate into more income for the museum so that it can expand its facility and showcase more pieces of military history.

There’s not much history available on the plane but Williams knows where it was in June 1956. The Navy plane, bureau number 141058 (which tracks the plane like a serial number in the military), was aboard the USS Essex, an aircraft carrier in the Pacific fleet.

A photo of the exact plane still clinging to arresting gear, steel wire cables used to decelerate planes during landings, is on the cover of a military magazine dedicated to the squadrons that flew the F9F-8.

Williams said it was a surprise to see their plane in the magazine, let alone in color on its cover. He said the photo helps the restoration process by providing a clear representation of its original paint scheme.

Thomas looks forward to the day the plane sits on its display pedestal as if taking to the sky.

“When we’re done with it, people would swear that it could fly,” Thomas said.

F9F-8 (F-9J) b/n 141058
*Upgraded to F9F-8B.
*1956: VF-112 as “V-204”.
*5/1/1964: Struck off charge at NAS Kingsville, TX.