Retired pilot lets ideas fly
| • | Map: Proposed air museum at Ford Island |
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
Hawai'i's planned new military aviation museum on Ford Island will offer more than gee-whiz jets and greasy aircraft engines, according to its new director.
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"That's the part that young boys really like," said B. Allan Palmer, who has just been hired away from the San Diego Aerospace Museum to help create the Military Aviation Museum of the Pacific.
Models pose in World War II Army Air Corps uniforms in front of a vintage aircraft at Hickam Air Force Base. The group and aircraft are being used to promote plans to establish an aviation museum on Ford Island.
Boys, and men, like the "the 'wow, look at that, it fought in a war and goes fast and looks great' part," Palmer said.
"But it's not just airplanes — they're greasy, and noisy, and women don't like them," he added.
Palmer said the museum, which hopes to be housed in the cavernous historic hangars on Ford Island in three years, also will incorporate a historical aspect, focused particularly on paper.
"What is it that made people go and fly those airplanes? That's how we are going to attract those folks who may not know an airplane from a shoebox."
He said demographics studies help show what kind of people come to such museums and why.
"Visitors can really understand when you start telling them what it's like to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, and what it is that makes people go and do that."
In fact, according to museum board president Clint Churchill, visitors may have a chance to experience such daring and difficult maneuvers themselves, in flight simulators.
"You could be a pilot in the Battle of Midway," said Churchill, envisioning a squadron of virtual fighter aircraft in which visitors could fly into history themselves.
When it comes to history, Palmer said, the Hawai'i museum has a distinct advantage.
As the "ground zero" of World War II, Ford Island, Palmer said was like "sacred ground," consecrated by the blood of thousands who died in Pearl Harbor 60 years ago, and now protected as a national historic site, he said.
Museum officials on Friday presented their proposal and business plan to the U.S. Navy and formally asked it to commit 22.7 acres of the 450-acre Ford Island. The Navy also is considering proposals for private, for-profit activities on surplus Navy land on Ford Island and elsewhere.
If approved, the museum would become part of an historic experience for visitors coming to Pearl Harbor to see the Arizona Memorial, the USS Bowfin submarine museum, and the USS Missouri battleship.
The four elements will take visitors from the beginning of the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, through the naval and air operations in which America fought back, to the surrender of the Japanese on the decks of the Missouri in 1945.
The museum had a banquet Thursday to launch its preliminary drive for $250,000 to continue planning and development.
After Navy approval is secured, Churchill said, fund-raising will begin in earnest, with a nationwide campaign for $20 million to build the first phase of the museum in two of the three historic hangars to be restored on Ford Island.
The first-phase money would pay for the restoration of Hangars 37 and 79, and air-conditioning systems.
About half of the money from that phase also would be spent on exhibits, with a large number of military aircraft in five historic periods, from the arrival of the first aircraft on O'ahu in 1913 up to the present.
A key find: The museum has located one of the P-40 fighter planes that was on the ground at Wheeler Field during the 1941 Japanese attack, and is hoping to raise $300,000 to restore that rare craft for preservation and display at the facility.
A second phase, in the $15 million to $20 million range, would encompass the historic air traffic control tower on the field, and Hangar 54, Churchill said.
Churchill said that when the museum opens in late 2004, it may be able to represent the highly technical precision aviation weapons being used in the war in Afghanistan.
Studies by the Prentice Co., a museum-planning firm based in Chicago, indicate a Ford Island facility could attract more than 250,000 visitors a year, with adult tickets selling for $10 to $15.
Palmer, a decorated fighter pilot in both the Navy and Air Force (four Distinguished Flying Crosses, 11 Air Medals, and the Silver Star), is returning to Hawai'i after more than five years at the San Diego Aerospace Museum, one of the top five such facilities in the country.
He is the former executive director of the Hawai'i Army Museum Society, and worked in The Queen's Health Systems companies, a computer company and an airline communications company here following his retirement from the Navy in 1986 with the rank of commander.
Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.
