Warbird Information Exchange

Thanks Edward for the clarification and updates to the museum. And welcome to the board Someday I will head up there and to Liberal. Kinda make a round robin trip.

Your welcome, Steve. I have been lurking here wayyyy too long.

A link to the Kansas Aviation Museum website....

http://www.kansasaviationmuseum.org/museum.php

The B-47 team will begin reassembly of the airframe next year. The reason the wings were cut is because if they are unbolted they are nearly impossible to reinstall. This was discovered when the airframes were still young and going through planned depot maintenance. Trying to reinstall the wings involves alignment of the milk bottle fittings; which is pretty much giving the whole airframe a chiropractic adjustment to get them to go in. It takes extensive tooling to be able to do it. So far the team has sourced a set of landing gear, wheels, and tires (all missing). Engineers have worked out the details on the wing splice plates. Cutting the wings and splicing them back together has been done to other B-47 static displays for the same reasons. There exists another B-47 out of our state that has had the wings removed at the fittings and now cannot be reassembled. Last I heard it will be scrapped by the Air Force.

Like it was already said, I am glad to see this saved. It was less than a month away from being turned into beer cans before the museum found out and put together an emergency response team to handle the disassembly, funding, logistics, and move to the Kansas Air Museum.

The airframe is gutted and could never be made flyable anyway. It is missing all of the systems, fuel cells, engines, and wiring. The Air Force really stripped it before they put it up on the pole.

I am excited to see this added to the museum collection to replace the one that was mounted on a pole on Highway 54 (West Wichita) but was moved to be a gate guard at McConnell AFB..

Welcome to posting on WIX, Edward. I saw great potential at the Museum last week, and look forward to the progress as it continues to unfold. Keep up the good work, and posting updates, especially with photos, would be appreciated.

I'm going to post a few photos of the restoration area and civilian aircraft over on the Vintage Aviation forum later.

Scott

Doc is presently in a hangar/storage building in the McConnell security area. It's inside and out of the weather, but there isn't any access for the public to view it. It's a temporary arrangement from the little I know, but thanks to whoever provided the protection for the airplane. The announcement is in the wikipedia entry for Doc, so I suppose it's alright to speak about it now.

Scott