Dundas aircraft monument to get paint job
For more than 40 years it has sat like a big trophy on King Street East in Dundas, a Cold War curiosity blistering in the sun.
But come Sept. 23, the CT-133 “Silver Star” Jet Trainer on the white pedestal beside the Hamilton Air Force Association building will fly again.
Mind you, it won’t be much of a flight. A crane will simply lift the plane upwards and gently place it on the ground.
But it will, for a short time, slip the surly bonds that have held it in place since 1976 and, more importantly, it will give its owners the chance to give the big bird a long-needed paint job.
“We plan to make this airplane shine again and involve the community in this endeavour,” says Ed Watson, the president of the air force association.
For a week volunteers will “polish, paint and re-decal the plane to its original splendour,” he said.
Then on Sept. 30, the crane will return to re-hoist the plane back onto its mounts. A ceremony at 11 a.m. that day is planned to celebrate the return of the aircraft.
“When I came in as president, I just saw it as something that needed to be fixed,” said Watson.
The project has a budget of $11,000, the biggest cost being the crane moves and the paint.
The Dundas landmark has been in place since March 1976, when the decommissioned plane was carried from CFB Camp Borden to Dundas by helicopter.
The Hamilton Air Force Association was looking for something eye catching and the Canadian Air Force was looking for good homes for obsolete aircraft from its collection.
The plane in Dundas was built in 1953, spending its career as a training craft, eventually retiring in April, 1975.
“I remember when I was 13 years old seeing the airplane being brought to Dundas with a Chinook helicopter,” says Campbell Harrod, who went on to become a vintage plane owner and restorer. He is volunteering his services to supervise the project.
“They couldn’t drop it in the parking lot because the gravel was too dusty. So they put it down the road and then used a crane truck to bring it back to the parking lot and put it on top of the pedestal,” he said.
At one point the plane used to have uniformed mannequins in the cockpit to represent the pilot and navigator. But back in the 1990s they were stolen. The association decided not to replace them.
Al Mickeloff, from the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, says the CT-133 was a common plane and is on display at numerous places across Canada, including the warplane museum.
That plane is kept in the museum’s hangar and doesn’t fly. It had a history with the Snowbirds in the early 1970s, he said. It was painted like a regular Snowbird aircraft and “was like an advanced scout for the team. It would hop ahead of the team to the air show that it was going to,” he said.
The museum plans to repaint the CT-133 back to its Snowbird colours over the next several months, said Mickeloff.
He said he knows of one CT-133 that is still flying in the area. It is part of a private collection in Waterloo.
We plan to make this airplane shine again ... ED WATSON PRESIDENT OF THE HAMILTON AIR FORCE ASSOCIATION