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PostPosted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 8:58 am 
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A hushed, dusty warehouse near Port Columbus holds the history of aviation in Columbus and Ohio since the 1920s. If these planes, documents and memorabilia from the daring early days of air travel could talk, their stories would be in stark contrast to the musty atmosphere that surrounds them.

But now, the collection that was once housed in the defunct Ohio History of Flight Museum next to Port Columbus is on the move again. The collection was donated in 1999 to the Ohio Historical Society, which has made deep cuts as its budget was slashed.

The organization plans to vacate the warehouse by February. There are two reasons: It can no longer afford the $4,000-per-month rent the Columbus Regional Airport Authority started charging in late 2006, after charging it nothing for the previous 6 1/2 years. And it hopes to get items on display at other Ohio sites.

The historical society shipped off two 1920s-vintage planes last month to Troy, where they will be displayed in the town in which they were made.

Sharon E. Dean, director of collections for the historical society, calls the plans an example of "great cooperation" between the society and local organizations that will put the artifacts on public view for the first time in a decade.

But the historical society still has thousands of items that came to it from the museum in 2000, after the museum closed its 15-year home next to Port Columbus.

Aviation enthusiasts, although happy that some items will again be displayed, are worried that the collection could be broken up and even sold off.

"I have received numerous phone calls and e-mail from all around the state of Ohio, expressing concern about the aviation collection and its disposition," said Russ Arledge, the former director of the flight museum.

Arledge was laid off from the Ohio Historical Society in March as the organization was forced to slash its budget.

"All I can say is that up until a few weeks ago, there was an entire aviation museum in storage waiting to be displayed or reopened as a stand-alone museum," he said.

Among the treasures: wicker chairs from Ford Tri-Motor aircraft that ferried passengers starting in 1929 from Port Columbus, as part of Transcontinental Air Transport's heralded 48-hour coast-to-coast link using both trains and planes.

There's a 1950s experimental "Inflatoplane" rescued from a Goodyear trash bin decades ago; the aviation museum declined Goodyear's request that it be returned and destroyed. And there's also the second most-complete set of "TWA Skyliner" employee newsletters known to exist, covering the 1940s through the 1980s.

The original plan to create a separate museum alongside the Ohio Historical Center to house aviation- and other transportation-related items fizzled over time. For the past 9 1/2 years, most of the items from the 20,000-square-foot flight museum have been jammed into the 6,000-square-foot warehouse.

A three-quarter-scale replica, and the only known re-creation, of an early Wright brothers plane will probably go to Dayton on long-term loan. Some items related to military aviation could go to Motts Military Museum in Groveport.

Arledge said that at one time the collection was offered to COSI. The science museum passed, he said, preferring to focus on science and space flight rather than aviation history. The collection was donated to the historical society along with nearly $200,000 in cash from donations and admissions, but that money has been nearly depleted by the rent alone.

Jim Thompson, a former volunteer collections manager at the museum and a US Airways employee, said he has mixed feelings about the items being scattered.

"On one hand, it will be nice to finally have some of the collection back on display at least somewhere, but sadly, not where it should be displayed," Thompson said. "We had it all together at a central location in the center of the state, in a major city. It's doubtful it will all ever be back together again."

Dean said the first priority is to place the items on long-term loan to sites across Ohio that have a connection to them and will display them publicly.

Any items that would end up being removed from the collection would be offered first for sale to other museums or institutions, she said.

And if items such as airplane model-making magazines are sold, the money would be "funneled back into collections."

Louise Jones, manager of research services for the historical society, said just taking stock of the items has been a daunting process, given the group's limited resources.

"We have 300 cubic feet of periodicals here," Jones said, looking around the airport-area warehouse. "The inventory alone takes up 350 boxes."

Arledge is sympathetic to the need to cull the collection, but he said, "It's a bit of a shame. Our mission was to collect every issue of every aviation publication we could, so we could have top-notch aviation research." He adds that the flight museum was the only one in Ohio devoted to aviation in general, rather than one with a geographic or military focus.

Started by Lane Aviation founder Foster Lane in 1984, the museum quickly gained a reputation as "one of the top three aviation resource centers in the country," Arledge said.

That reputation led the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to donate to Columbus its extra set of the Official Airline Guide, a researcher's bible that includes information on virtually every commercial flight ever flown in the U.S. Only the Smithsonian and the National Transportation Safety Board have more-complete sets.

Arledge said a popular perception that the museum folded for lack of public interest isn't true. Before it closed, the museum was attracting good numbers and had big plans, he said.

Still, with the museum struggling to raise money and keep volunteers by 1999, the airport authority struck a deal to buy out the museum's lease. The building was later razed to make way for the Hilton Garden Inn and Hampton Inn, built on land owned by the authority.

Another plan for the collection that hasn't panned out is to put at least some of it in a building at Ohio State University's Don Scott Field on the Northwest Side.

Doug Hammon, director of the airport, said officials there would still welcome that, but it would require working with the university and the Federal Aviation Administration on plans. Another concern: that the museum be self-sustaining, something that most museums without deep-pocketed donors struggle with.

After a long career working around aviation, Arledge said he hopes Columbus won't "once again lose its importance in aviation history" even as the state launches efforts to attract more aviation-industry investment and to interest students in aviation careers.

"I still feel responsible to the thousands of donors, the hundreds of volunteers and the people that aren't with us anymore," Arledge said. "The air museum was our baby."

mrose@dispatch.com


Found it here:
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/lo ... ml?sid=101


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:02 am 
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Really do wish it could stay here; aside from Motts there aren't many museums focusing on this area in Columbus. I do wonder if the Caravelle still belongs to them, though; it's been used by the Airport FD for a while now.


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