Preserve & protect

This process culminated 15 years later when, at the site of the RAAF’s birthplace at Point Cook, Victoria, the RAAF Museum (RAAFM) opened, displaying a small, disparate collection of military aircraft from Australia, the UK and Germany.

Since then the museum has honed its focus, divested itself of its ex Luftwaffe aircraft, and now concentrates exclusively on collecting, restoring and preserving aircraft and artefacts connected only with the RAAF or Australian Flying Corps.

It’s a task that fully occupies a staff of 23 technicians, curators, pilots, researchers and registration and administration staff, supported by a small army of volunteers.

The growth in staff and allocated resources is evidence of the growing importance of, and interest in, the history of military aviation in Australia. The RAAF currently has two heritage centres in Wagga and Amberley, with overall subject matter expert status given to the RAAF Museum in Point Cook. As defined by the International Council of Museums, the RAAFM is “a nonprofit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. ”The museum enjoys the status of a fully constituted unit within the RAAF, and its budget and operating expenses are provided by the Air Force Training Group, which oversees the museum in the prosecution of its mission to ‘collect and preserve’.

As such, the RAAF Museum continues to expand its collection of historically important RAAF aircraft by means of acquisition and restoration, and is continuing to take possession of an increasing amount of donated memorabilia relating to Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East.

Australian Aviation visited the museum, located a short drive from the Melbourne CBD, to profile its current activities.

The Director

The present director of the museum is David Gardner, who has been associated with the RAAFM since its beginnings.

Gardner joined the Air Force in 1967 as an aircraft technician, and went on to work on a number of types including the Neptune, Canberra and F-111.

His penultimate posting was to 1 Flying Training School at Point Cook, where he worked on CT-4s before being posted to the RAAF Museum as curator in 1986.

After completing degrees in museum management, Gardner successfully applied for the job as director when it was civilianised in 1999, and has held the role since.

He is thus well placed to sketch the museum’s progress over the last quarter century, and in particular how he, his curatorial staff and volunteers adhere to the museum’s guiding philosophy.

“The mission here is to collect and preserve AFC and RAAF heritage,” he explained to Australian Aviation. “You may well say ‘We’ve got the Australian War Memorial in Canberra’ – that’s true and they’ve got their charter and they stick to the conflict side of things – Boer War, WW1 and 2, peacekeeping and the like. But we do the whole gamut of RAAF operations. My charter is to cover the whole of that and make it accessible to the 120,000 visitors we get each year, so they can see what we’re on about and what we do. ” Gardner recalls that when the museum was founded, a broad group of qualified experts was consulted to best define a wishlist of ‘core’ aircraft to display. Where possible, the museum has acquired pieces of such aircraft (such as the Lincoln tail in the new Strike Hangar), but the process is hampered by the rarity of extant iconic aircraft.

As former RAAF Historian Dr Alan Stephens put it, “large numbers [of wartime aircraft] were stripped of accessories, broken down, and sold as scrap metal or dumped, a process during which an irreplaceable part of Australia’s aviation and wartime heritage was lost. ” These days, however, there is a much higher awareness of the historical value of retired military aircraft, and the museum takes a leading role in ensuring that significant airframes find their way to its collection. In Gardner’s words, “We’ll also be watching those F/A-18s that served in Iraq and Diego Garcia like hawks. We know which ones we want, so when they’re ready to retire, we’ll grab them. ”

Spitfire Recovery

Five RAAF squadrons served as a part of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command during WW2. Until recently, the museum had no display that commemorated the sacrifice of the 191 Australians who lost their lives flying fighters in Europe.

In October 2010, the remains of a 453SQN Spitfire LF. IXB MJ789 and its pilot, Australian FLTLT Henry ‘Lacy’ Smith, were found near Caen in northern French, where it had laid buried in an estuary since 1944.

The Commonwealth Graves Commission took possession of WJ Smith’s remains for burial, and the French authorities kindly offered the remnants of the Spitfire to the museum, where it is currently undergoing preservation.

“It’ll be quite an important display, because we’ve got a lot of things in the collection that relate to Bomber Command, and we did have Fighter Command [in Europe] but in people’s blinkered view, fighters did the Battle of Britain and they think the rest was Bomber Command,” Gardner says. “When I was offered the remains of this Spit I thought ‘Great, let’s do it’. When it comes out of conservation [in six to eight months], we will have something to show the public. ”

Plans For Expansion

The scheduled retirement of several important types of aircraft such as the P-3 Orion and C-130H presents the museum with much needed opportunities to expand its display facilities.

The challenge of displaying such large aircraft can be appreciated by comparing the amount of space required to exhibit the museum’s recently acquired F-111s. With wings swept forward, the Pig will command a hefty 500m2 of hangar floor, an amount halved by folding its wings back.

The open storage of oversized exhibits such as the uncovered Bristol Freighter and C-130A is an added factor influencing the need to construct a new hangar of sizeable dimensions, as continued exposure to the elements will only make their eventual restoration more prolonged and expensive.

At this stage, the new hangar is one of a number of proposals put forward for Air Force’s consideration, another being the future display of a Boeing 707 nose section with an audiovisual component that would help educate museum visitors on the career of the ex 33SQN aircraft in RAAF service.

New large hangars, however, don’t come cheap, if the National Museum of the US Air Force is any guide. It is currently engaged in a major capital construction program to expand the museum’s present 92,000m2 of exhibit space with a fourth building that will house the Space Gallery, Presidential Aircraft Gallery, and a Global Reach Gallery that will house not only a C-141, but a C-5. To date the USAF museum has secured $37 million towards construction, but at this stage Gardner is unable to guess the eventual sum needed to finance his museum’s new hangar. It would not be unreasonable to assume that such a showpiece should be completed in time for the RAAF’s centenary in 2021.

Flying Heritage

As with the RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, the RAAF maintains a collection of airworthy examples of historic aircraft for display, namely a CAC Mustang, CAC Winjeel, CT-4, DH Tiger Moth, CAC Sabre and a Sopwith Pup replica. Overseeing the museum’s flying operations is operations officer WGCDR Warren Madsen. WGCDR Madsen is a member of the permanent Air Force and comes to the museum after serving as CO and CFI at the Central Flying School in Sale. It is his responsibility to manage the museum’s roster of 13 pilots for its thrice weekly interactive flying displays and flypasts. He also monitors currency and qualifications of pilots, in addition to training replacements.

WGCDR Madsen is presently overseeing the training of a future Mustang pilot, and outlined the process: “Flying the Mustang is quite a complex business, with significant experience required on fairly heavy, tail-wheel aircraft such as the Harvard, before being considered for conversion on to the Mustang. Training on the Mustang itself is then, ideally, conducted on a dual control Mustang. ” With the exception of the Sabre, all of the aircraft are based at Point Cook and operated by the museum. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at 1pm, one of these aircraft conducts display flights at Point Cook, with weather conditions often dictating which aircraft can be flown (the Pup replica – see title pic – needing particularly benign conditions and an available pilot).

Total hours accrued by each type over a year is modest, with the aircraft maintained on 50 to 100 hour maintenance cycles.

The aircraft in the collection are still owned by the Commonwealth, and are operated as antique aircraft under CASA rules. The one exception is the CA-27 Sabre which, in a unique legal arrangement, is maintained by the Temora Aviation Museum on behalf of the Air Force, but flown by a serving Air Force pilot, SQNLDR Paul Simmons, an F/A-18 FCI and former exchange pilot on F-15s. The aircraft, Mk 32 CA-27 Sabre A94‑983/VH-IPN, saw service with 75 SQN before being donated to the Royal Malaysian Air Force in 1971. Five years later it returned to Australia, and was restored to flying condition by the RAAF before eventual storage at Point Cook. In 2005, then Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Geoff Shepherd announced the aircraft would be formally loaned to Temora, to undergo a return to flyable condition as a means of “keeping Australian war history accessible to future generations”.

After a considerable amount of time, effort and money (reportedly in the area of $4 million), the Sabre was again airborne and is now displayed around the country, and is slated to make an appearance at the upcoming Point Cook Air Pageant on February 26.

Preserving The Past

Much of the technical staff ’s efforts at the museum are concentrated on preparing aircraft for and maintaining aircraft on display.

As Gardner explains, a high degree of planning went into the selection of historic F-111 airframes for preservation, which were then readied for their public debut.

Not all aircraft age gracefully. “You look at the Mirage. It’s been out of service since 1988 and it’s still dripping oil!”

“Looking after an F-111 statically is no different to looking after a Tiger Moth.

You’ve got tyres to look after, struts to look after, the mainplane to look after. The Tiger Moth is wood and fabric – the composite material of its day. You have to get rid of the batteries out of them, the hydraulics, and the more sensitive avionics. The engines are preserved by being inhibited. They sit there but you still keep the windscreen clean, keep the dust off them, make sure the tyres are ok. Seals will give way, so we look at that. The maintenance directed towards static aircraft is ongoing. ” Corrosion management is also an ongoing process, and not all aircraft age gracefully.

“You look at the Mirage. It’s been out of service since 1988 and it’s still dripping oil!” Just as vital to the museum’s mission is the preservation of artefacts and memorabilia donated by the public. The rapidly thinning ranks of WW2 and Korea veterans means the museum is increasingly acquiring valuable, significant troves of items that help illustrate the breadth of the Air Force’s activities during those wars.

But equally valuable treasures from earlier wars have found their way to the museum, often unannounced. Gardner relates how a woman arrived at the front desk recently with a box of paraphernalia she had been keeping for 42 years. The mystery box contained, among other keepsakes, the so called ‘Death Penny’, or memorial plaque, of the first Australian airman to die in WW1, LTGeorge Mertz.

Along the way, the museum has also managed to acquire such things as a hipflask belonging to Pacific theatre VC awardee, FLTLT William Newton (who, coincidentally, logged flight time on two of the museum’s aircraft, its Douglas Boston, ‘J for Jessica’ and its Avro Cadet).

Curators at the museum are also actively engaged in collecting such items as flags, uniforms and documentation, which, if not stored, find their way to the Heritage Gallery in the museum’s main building.

Exhibits staged here take on a theme that aims to highlight a chapter in the Air Force’s history that may have escaped popular attention.

However, as Gardner points out, those wishing to donate such things to the museum needn’t wait so long. “We’re always looking for things that tell the story of what the Air Force is doing today. So if personnel have a souvenir from say, Afghanistan, don’t throw it away, bring it in. ”

Under Restoration

Visitors to the museum can not only enjoy the aircraft in their static or flying form, but also those undergoing restoration. In a separate hangar, trained technicians and volunteers go about the exhaustive, painstaking process of returning what is often a collection of parts to its former state.

The museum has reduced the number of simultaneous restorations to a manageable number, in order to better utilise scarce, skilled workers. Certainly, the restoration of the museum’s de Havilland Mosquito represents an enormous undertaking and the mastery of specific construction techniques not commonly used for three quarters of a century. The whole project is managed by a museum staff member, with the meticulous restoration and remanufacturing of components performed by volunteers giving freely of their own time and expertise.

Such devotion is also displayed by Andrew Willox, who is currently building an exact replica of a Royal Aircraft Factory B. E. 2a (as used by the Australian Flying Corps in France), complete with wicker seats – made after studying a basket weaving course! The replica, due for completion in 2014 at an estimated cost of $55,000, will be donated to the museum by Willox and join the collection’s Bristol Boxkite and Deperdussin Monoplane, filling an important niche in the collection.

In the longer term, restoration of the Museum’s Kittyhawk and Beaufighter will begin, and take their place among the museum’s immense collection that includes items as diverse as decompression chambers, Unimog trucks, boats, squadron pennants and fountain pens – all of which are collected, recorded and maintained by the dedicated staff and volunteers of the RAAF Museum, who collect and preserve the heritage of the RAAF.