Central Air Force Museum Forum and YouTube Channel

[Noha307]

I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the volunteers at the Central Air Force Museum in Russia have a forum called Aviarestorer for discussing their work and the aircraft at the museum. Obviously it's in Russian, but a Google Translate will reveal a lot of interesting information. For example, I came across a link to a news story about the restoration of the DB-3 at the museum, how the powers that be wanted it to be restored as a pointy-nosed Il-4, and how the restorers (it was restored offsite) went against orders and restored it accurately as a DB-3.

Also, one of the volunteers at the museum has an excellent YouTube channel that profiles some of the restoration work going on at the museum. One of the most interesting subjects so far has been how the volunteers got the "droop snoot", "moustache" canards, and nose landing lights on the Tu-144 working again. (For example, here.)

Finally, I'm not sure where it currently stands, a few years ago the museum was fighting relocation to "Patriot Park" – a weird museum/theme park hybrid. Among other issues, the staff of the museum were apparently concerned that the larger aircraft at the museum would either be damaged or scrapped as part of the move.[1]

[Michel Lemieux]

Really interesting! Thank you for sharing.

[Michel Lemieux]

Interesting material

Take a guess what and where...hints in the background.

[LysanderUK]

Thanks for the link Noha75, great to see so much activity. Monino is such a great collection, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it's one of the best in the world. I sincerely hope the relocation plan has been shelved, when I first heard about it a couple of years ago I couldn't believe it was even being considered.

[Noha307]

So I've been reading through the forums and learned a couple of interesting things:

• First, the volunteers are particularly upset about the sale of some of the aircraft to westerners. An La-11 that is in storage at The Fighter Collection in England is a particular point of irritation. I can hardly say I blame them. (The Russian newspaper Kommersant wrote an article on the whole affair back in 1993.)
• Second, the volunteers apparently don't have access to the aircraft records at the museum, which strikes me as very odd. Conditional archive access at museums is nothing new, but it seems like they sometimes even have trouble just reconstructing the basic history of the aircraft at the museum.
• Third, and this should be pretty unsurprising, they receive basically no support from the government (which almost seems to be hostile at some times). Given these conditions, what they have been able to accomplish has to be commended.
• Nevertheless, the situation may be improving, as the museum was apparently offered some aircraft by the miliary last year.

I also came across a number of fascinating pictures of restorations and recoveries over the years. I find these particularly interesting because I know there have been a number of questions over the years of how much of some of the aircraft on display are actually original:

DB-3:


(Source: VSP.ru)

R-5:





(Source: LiveJournal)

Pe-8 (in "storage" at the museum):



(Source: Aviarestorer)

ANT-4 (did not end up at museum):

(Source: LiveJournal)

S-38 (later scrapped):

(Source: Aviarestorer)

[Clifford Bossie]

Fascinating. I enjoy seeing the efforts of other museums and volunteers. Thank you for posting!

[LysanderUK]

Amazing "storage" yard shots, here's hoping something can be done with the Pe-8 in the not too distant future.

That wrecked ANT-4/TB-1 got my brain churning up some distant memory: Didn't Jerry Yeagen have a wreck like this as a project at one time? Is this wreck the Yeagen example??

I tried a bit of Googling but nothing useful comes up, although I did find out that there is a complete ANT-4 at the Museum of Civil Aviation at Ulyanovsk, seemingly the only complete example in existence.

http://www.uvauga.ru/museum

[Michel Lemieux]

Didn't Jerry Yeagen have a wreck like this as a project at one time?

My recollection as well!

[StangStung]

Thanks so much for taking the time to collect this info and post it. The Soviets had a such an interesting aviation history, not the least of which was their engagement in WWII. Such a shame that so little has been preserved given its' tremendous importance to the defeat of the Nazis. Glad to see they're making progress though. I can only hope we see more of it in the future.

[Noha307]

As a follow up, a user named Советская авиация (Soviet aviation)/zabroshki (abandoned) on the social media site Дзен (Zen) has posted a number of articles about the history of the airframes on display and addressing some of the myths about the museum. It's not clear who the individual is, but they are clearly directly associated with the museum in some way given their posts about the volunteers' work. It seems likely that it is the same individual named Стипан (Stipan), given the answers they provided in a thread titled История экспонатов музея (History of the museum exhibits) on Aviarestorer. Either way, their posts offer really unique and detailed insights you can just about be guaranteed to not find anywhere else and I highly recommend taking some time to read through them.