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In a windswept moonscape of hard-packed mud, dirt and gravel, iron workers weld pieces of steel together to build trusses that look like pieces of a space station as part of the creation of the $35.4 million new hangar at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
Forty workers with the help of a giant red crane and an army of wheeled- and tread-powered construction vehicles, have raised four of the 22 semi-circular trusses that will be the backbone of the future of the Air Force museum.
Set to open in 2016, the new hangar and fourth building at the world’s largest military aviation museum is the biggest expansion at the popular attraction in more than a decade. When finished, it will house historic presidential planes to legendary experimental, one-of-a-kind rocket planes, fighter and bomber jets and spacecraft off-limits today to most of the museum’s more than one million visitors a year.
“It’s amazing,” said Frances A. Duntz, chairwoman of the Air Force Museum Foundation, which spent years raising money for the expansion. “It’s like watching a dream come true. We’ve been working so hard, several years to fund the start of this construction, and it’s great to see it come up.”
The non-profit foundation privately raised $40 million donated by individual, foundation and corporate donors, and has targeted raising an additional $6 million before the hangar opens to pay for theatrical lightning, aircraft tow paths and amphitheater-like “learning nodes” to teach students about science, technology, engineering and math.
The ongoing work will mean the five-month closure of the Missile and Space Gallery at the rear of the museum, beginning Dec. 8, to give crews time to build a two-story walkway from the silo-shaped gallery to the new hangar.
On Thursday morning in the bitter cold and wind, hard-hatted workers continued their labor as part of a plan to finish construction on the 224,000-square-foot hangar by next August. Most of the construction workers on site live in the Dayton region, builders said. Every week through part of the winter, a towering crane will hoist 90,000 pounds of the 85-feet-tall and 300-feet-wide steel trusses into place along 200,000-pound concrete buttresses partially buried underground.
“This is a very unique project,” said Tim Walsh, a Turner Construction Co. quality construction manager.
Once construction is complete, museum workers will spend months preparing to open exhibits to the public by the spring of 2016 in the Presidential, Research and Development, Space and Global Reach galleries, said museum director John “Jack” Hudson. “We’re really looking forward to seeing the progress,” he said.
The massive relocation will move presidential and research aircraft out of an old hangar in a restricted area at Wright-Patterson —accessible to most visitors today only through a shuttle bus — to the main complex.
Among the aircraft that will have a new home: The giant, delta-winged, six-engine powered XB-70 Valkyrie, tested in the 1960s to fly at three times the speed of sound, and the blue and white Boeing 707 presidential jet that returned President John F. Kennedy’s body to Washington after his Nov. 22, 1963 assassination in Dallas. The hangar will house a C-141C Starlifter, known as the Hanoi Taxi, which brought back the first American Prisoners of War during the Vietnam War. The cargo jet sits outside the museum today.
In 1971, then-President Richard M. Nixon opened the first building on the museum’s current 400-acre Wright Field home.
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