First Air Force One (A Connie) to be Restored

One of the most beautiful airliners made.

 

Its interesting, seems like relatively light effort to get this one back in the air. Possibly because it flew relatively recently and was not scavenged.

The Connie that went to Weeks seemd to need years of effort and was only really up to a ferry flight.

The Quantas one also needed lots and lots of work, although maybe a superconstellation a lot more complex.

i imagine with so many military ones being operable untill 30 odd years ago there are plently of spare bits about. Still amazing that there are enough skilled people to get one of these operable again, and even pilots to fly it.

Do we even still have the right high octane fuel to run these big radials, or must they be detuned to run on todays avgas.

There is also some great footage from about 15 years ago when some people got a convair 880 going in Mojave only to send it to the FAA for fire trainign in NJ.

I guess its all about how they were prepped for storage and where stored.

 

Looks like the kansas one has been sitting forever, and hard to tell the scale of effort, I think there were also a few in maine?

Maybe Cloumbine 2 had a full crew of knowledgeable people working on it so the process was quicker. But I also suspect as it flew last not so long ago, and was stored in the dessert it was in relatively good shape to start with.

 

columbine 3 at the airforce museum looks great though.