On June 26, 2005, the San Diego Union-Tribune (
visit link) ran the following story:
"Museum celebrates effort to rebuild its proud legacy
By Hala Ali Aryan
STAFF WRITER
June 26, 2005
Twenty-seven years ago on a chilly February evening, three Chula Vista teenagers shoved papers into a Balboa Park pillar and lighted the wad to keep warm. By the next morning, decades of aviation history had been reduced to ashes. The San Diego Aerospace Museum was gone.
Almost immediately, efforts got under way to rebuild the museum's collection.
A group of museum volunteers and aviation buffs went to work building airplanes. San Diego County residents hit their garages and closets rummaging for artifacts. Two years later, the museum reopened at Balboa Park's Ford Building.
The museum will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its rebirth Tuesday with simulator rides, children's activities, cake and an announcement of a new donation to its exhibits.
Festivities take wing
The San Diego Aerospace Museum's 25th anniversary celebration will take place at noon Tuesday. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily during the summer. Admission is $9, seniors and students $7, children 6 to 17 $4, active-duty military and children 5 and younger free. Information: or (619) 234-8291.
The National Museum of the United States Air Force has agreed to lend the Aerospace Museum an RQ-1 Predator, an unmanned aircraft manufactured in the late 1990s by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems.
The plane will go on display sometime this summer.
Predators were used in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Yemen. Although the plane being sent to the Aerospace Museum was used only for reconnaissance, they can be armed. Predators are being manufactured for the Air Force.
The Aerospace Museum opened in 1963 in the Electric Building on the Prado in Balboa Park. From the beginning, museum officials worried about the danger of a fire in the building, which was built in 1915 for the Panama Pacific International Exposition. On the night of February 22, 1978, their fears were realized.
The fire was reported shortly after 8 p.m. It destroyed the building and everything in it, including 55 aircraft, in less than two hours.
Also destroyed were memorabilia and displays of the International Aerospace Hall of Fame, the museum's neighbor in the building.
Art Robertson, a San Diego Fire Department battalion chief and lead investigator for the blaze, said in 2001 that three Chula Vista teenagers had started the fire, but that they would not be arrested because the statute of limitations for the crime had long since passed.
Just days after the Electric Building fire, an unrelated blaze apparently set by an arsonist destroyed the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park. It was rebuilt and reopened Jan. 14, 1982.
Tony Beres was a museum volunteer at the time and watched the Aerospace Museum fire on television. The next day, he helped sort through the rubble to see if anything could be salvaged.
"It was a terrific loss. I didn't find anything usable," said Beres, now the museum's director of restoration. "There were items that just couldn't be replaced. Some airplanes were one of a kind. A lot of Lindbergh memorabilia was lost."
Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic made him a global celebrity. San Diego's airport was named for him in 1928. The plane he flew on his epic flight was built in San Diego by Ryan Airlines Corp., and he tested it here.
John Alcorn, a master model airplane builder visiting the museum at the time of the blaze, ran back in to try to save something and grabbed a model airplane made of sticks and tissue paper. It now hangs in Beres' office as a reminder of the museum's rebirth.
Navy Capt. Zeke Cormier, who served as acting director of the museum for a time, and Navy Capt. Edwin D. McKellar Jr., who held the post from 1980 to 2000, spearheaded the effort to bring the museum back to life.
Museum officials had planned for years before the fire to move into Balboa Park's Ford Building, built for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition. The move was scheduled to take place in June 1978.
After the fire, people from all over the world, but especially San Diego County, donated airplanes, artifacts and $3.5 million to get the museum back on its feet.
The volunteers who rebuilt planes for the exhibits became known as Phoenix Flight. The group now comprises 375 active members. Volunteers with more than two years' continuous active service or 1,000 hours of volunteer work are awarded "Phoenix Flight" status.
In 1986, the San Diego Aerospace Museum became the first museum of its type to receive accreditation by the American Association of Museums.
Today, it displays 68 aircraft throughout 100 exhibits. Phoenix Flight members and other volunteers labor passionately in the 22,000-square-foot basement of the Aerospace Museum, out of sight of most visitors.
One level below the main floor, elevator doors open to a Santa's Workshop of aviation. Dozens of men – all gray-haired or bald – saw, drill, sand and measure away with no idle chit-chat. The average age is 73.
"This basement was a bomb shelter in World War II," said Ross Davis, the museum's education and volunteer coordinator. "Now it's a factory."
One plane can take as long as 10 years to rebuild because the volunteers often do not have the original plans to use as a guide.
Jerry Orr sits at a desk looking at a book on the Boeing P-26, a pursuit plane built in 1932. The P-26 was the first all-metal monoplane fighter produced for the Army Air Corps. Boeing manufactured 136 in all.
The company has the plans but won't provide them, citing liability concerns. So Orr's group of volunteers – the oldest is 97 – has toiled four years, rebuilding every aspect of the plane down to the smallest part. They expect the project to take an addiltional three years.
"It's a big family working here," said Orr, a retired aerospace engineer for Boeing. "We're all interested in planes, we worked on them or had a childhood interest in them. Some of our wives are gone; other's wives want us out of the house."
Although the museum offers tours of its basement, most members of the public do not know it exists. Officials hope the anniversary celebration will make the public more aware not only of the museum's efforts to keep San Diego's aviation history alive, but of the museum's existence at the edge of Balboa Park.
Of the approximately 3 million people who visit Balboa Park's museums each year, about 200,000 visit the Aerospace Museum. The nonprofit organization, run by a board of directors and president and chief executive officer Kendall W. Curtis, is supported by admissions, museum memberships, grants, donations and corporate sponsorships.
The museum's board is crafting a 20-year strategic plan that includes the addition of an aviation learning center with flight simulators, expansion of the library and archives and adding sound and lighting to the exhibits to further immerse patrons in the experience.
The museum is planning to open an exhibit on women in aviation in 2007.
"I don't think San Diegans appreciate the role San Diego played in the aviation industry," said Ruth Chandler Varonfakis, the museum's spokeswoman. "The museum is San Diego's aviation attic.""