History is in the air here

Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville has the plane facts

By Paul Duchene

The Portland Tribune, Nov 8, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

If all goes well, by next spring the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville will have both the biggest and the fastest planes on display.

A sinister-looking SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane will join Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” flying boat in the museum next April. Meanwhile, the Spruce Goose will be open to the public at the beginning of the year.

The museum currently is waiting on the dismantling of SR-71 number 61-7971 at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California for shipment, says Mike Wright, the museum’s head of vintage aircraft maintenance and restoration.

The crew at Edwards already has removed ejector seats and various secret parts from the plane, but it can’t be flown to McMinnville because it needs a 15,000-foot runway to land, Smith says. So, the plane will trucked to McMinnville.

The reassembled Blackbird eventually will join the Hughes flying boat and 41 other planes in the 121,000-square-foot museum, which was built in 1999.

One of only 21 remaining of the original 50 made, the museum’s Blackbird was built in 1966 and was active through 1997, says Tom Pugh, a retired SR-71 pilot. Satellites replaced SR-71 duties, but Pugh still remembers the planes fondly.

“It’s quite different than any other aircraft, mainly due to the extreme high altitude and ultrahigh speed,” he says. “Flying at 85,000 feet at 2,200 miles an hour, you can see 700 miles and sense the curvature of the earth. It’s a wonderful experience, in a class by itself.”

The museum’s star attraction remains the enormous Spruce Goose, considered the biggest plane to have ever flown. It nearly reaches the 79-foot museum roof and has wings that span 320 feet Ñ more than a football field. The plane has eight engines.

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