Restored Millington Blue Angel preserves history
It turns out, old war planes are like onions. Sometimes to find the history, you have to peel back the layers.
Despite its decades on display, when the restoration team at Visual Perfection and Towing peeled back the layers of the 60-year-old Millington Blue Angel Grumman F-11, they found an old shell casing and a can of root beer hiding in its crevices.
And when they scrapped off a layer of paint, they found written on the nose of the plane: “Memphis.”
“They found little hidden pieces of the past,” said Roy Remington, executive director of the Millington Memphis Airport Authority. Now the past is preserved for the future. The plane that a generation of Millington residents grew up seeing anchored on Navy Road has been fully restored. About 100 people braved the 90-degree heat and stood on blacktop at the airport Saturday to see the relic of wars past come home after an eight-month absence.
The blue and gold plane, with cursive “Blue Angel” on the front and block lettered “U.S. Navy” on the back, made a two-hour journey from the restoration warehouse to the airport Saturday morning. It traveled with much pomp and circumstance, including a motorcycle honor guard and a Ford Mustang painted to match the Blue Angel.
All went according to plan, with the exception of a mishap when the truck towing the 20,000 pound, 46foot-long plane backed up into the Mustang, causing some front-end damage.
Whether insurance covers “backed into by historic naval plane” remains to be seen.
Greeting the plane at the airport were two airport firetrucks that shot water overhead in a majestic water cannon salute—one everyone in attendance likely wished was aimed toward the crowd.
With an American flag hanging from its tail, the plane came to rest on a circular patch of grass adored with miniature flags around the perimeter. It will eventually be moved to a new home after a $3 million road project to connect
“This plane is a symbol of the pride that this community has in its U.S. Navy,” Remington said.
The aircraft dates back to 1957, assembled in Ithaca, New York and went immediately into service on the USS Intrepid in the Mediterranean in 1957-58, Remington said.
It became a training aircraft in Kansas City and Chase Field in Texas, and then Millington, where it was retired. It wasn’t used by the Navy’s famed Blue Angels, although the squadron did fly F-11s at one time.
The airport authority took over the lease of the plane from the Navy in 2016, committed to keeping it in Millington and restoring it.
James Jones, the owner of Visual, said his initial plan was just to sand down the aircraft and paint it. But veterans found their way to his shop, he said, some with tears in their eyes, expressing their thanks for his work on the plane that meant so much to them.
A full chemical stripping and restoration was in order, Jones said. They took off the wings and the tail, using 20 cans of WD-40 to remove the bolts that held the plane together.
“I’m about to pass out,” Jones said, not from the heat, but from seeing his team’s finished product.
Former Millington resident Lisa Richerson, now of Tipton County, saw the aircraft parade by her on Covington Pike and headed for the airport to watch its arrival.
It brought back memories, she said, of living near the naval base and watching the planes go by. After seeing the restored aircraft, she said, it’s not as big as her childhood memory remembered. She now also better appreciates what it represents.
“Now you just have so much respect for the people who flew those planes,” she said.
Reach Jennifer Pignolet at jennifer.pignolet@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @JenPignolet.