The YouTube story about the very first Air Force One being unknowingly purchased by Greybull’s favorite and most notable pilot, Mel Christler, gets more interesting with information included in an Internet article on Christler Flying Service.
According to Christler he got a call in 1980 from Robert Mikesh, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, asking him if he was aware that his “spares” airplane, one of five he had purchased in 1970 and was now stored in Tucson, Ariz., was Columbine II, Dwight Eisenhower’s first presidential Constellation.
By this time, however, the airplane’s most useful parts had been donated to its working sisters.
Mel felt terrible about what had happened to the historic aircraft and set out to remedy the situation.
In 1985 Christler and his son, Lockie, attended the Globe Air auction in Mesa and bid $5,000 for Columbine II’s sistership. The plan was to ferry the sister ship to Ryan Field in Tucson and use its parts to restore Columbine II.
In 1989 the restoration of Columbine II began. It was completed in April 1990 and toured the United State in 1990 and 1991.
Christler and his partner Harry Oliver, integral to the restoration, thought the perfect home for the aircraft was the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, but little interest was expressed by the museum.
A note of interest was that the “sistership” purchased by Christler for the restoration was originally named “Dewdrop” and was to be presidential-hopeful Dewey’s presidential airplane. When Harry Truman won the 1948 election he chose a DC-/VC-118 as his airplane. The name Dewdrop was removed from the “Connie,” and it was assigned to the USAF’s VIP squadron at National Airport in Washington, D.C. It was scrapped at Ryan Field in January 2002.
Read more here: http://www.greybullstandard.com
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