It’s been nearly half a century since a plane like Charlie was in Columbus.
Charlie is a Fairfield C-119 “Flying Boxcar” and will be sitting outside the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum by the end of 2021 if the museum’s “Project Charlie 119” continues according to plan.
“We’ve been at this six months putting it back together, and it’s starting to look like something – it’s starting to look like a plane,” said Skip Taylor, the project’s co-leader.
Museum volunteers have spent the second half of 2020 reconstructing the old military transport plane. C-119s were a common sight in Columbus post-World War II, and the museum and Columbus Municipal Airport wanted to bring a piece of history back to the city.
“It has its genesis back into the mid-’90s – there were people that tried to work on getting a full-size C-119 here, and they just couldn't quite get it pulled off,” Taylor said.
C-119s and Columbus
With the Second World War raging in 1942, the U.S. Army needed a place to train ground and air troops to “learn to work as a combat team” and constructed Atterbury Army Air Base near Columbus because of its flat land. The base remained active, training troops from 1943-1946, when it was placed on standby status.
The C-119 was introduced in 1949, and by the end of the ’50s, the monstrous “Boxcars” were all over the renamed Bakalar Air Force Base. They would remain in Columbus until the base closed in 1970.
A C-119 gets the all clear in this 1958 photo at Bakalar Air Force Base. (Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum)
“It was like eight diesel engines going down the road unmuffled,” Taylor said. “You can imagine the noise and the sound that they made flying over the city and around the area.”
The U.S. Air Force used C-119s mainly to transport cargo and troops during the Korean and Vietnam wars. According to Taylor, Charlie was built for the Canadian Air Force.
“The Canadiens sold it to the civilians and it became a cargo hauler, then a sprayer and served its time fighting forest fires or spraying for bugs out west,” he said.
Project Charlie 119: A Learning Opportunity
So when museum volunteers found a listing for Charlie online in early 2019, they knew they had to act. After a group made the trip to Greybull, Wyoming and determined the C-119 was in good shape, they purchased it.
“This one last flew in 1990,” said museum board member David Day. “So we hired a contractor out in Greybull to dismantle the airplane so it can be shipped here by truck.”
Volunteers have spent the last six months reconstructing Charlie.
“We identified this one in particular because of our accessibility to be able to go inside of the aircraft eventually,” said Columbus Municipal Airport director Brian Payne. “And we knew that from a youth standpoint, we wanted to see the youth of the community be able to actually sit in the cockpit and understand what these aircraft meant.”
Inside the plane, visitors will be able to learn how the C-119 works, its military history and its connection to Columbus.
The way things are going, Charlie should be outside of the museum by spring but won’t be finished. The crew will then reattach the wings and refurbish the plane to look like a U.S. C-119, and the hope is the exhibit will be ready to go by the end of next year.
