Flight Museum Lumbers Toward Liftoff : Aircraft: Seven years after the idea of a display took hold, planes lie scattered and exposed at Edwards AFB, home to aviation and aerospace pioneers.

Doug Nelson, the museum curator at Edwards Air Force Base, has helped assemble an array of more than 50 aircraft at the nation’s premier flight test facility, enough to make aviation buffs olive drab with envy.

The collection includes a massive B-52D Stratofortress, a pair of sleek and speedy Blackbird spy planes, sisters to the X-1 rocket ship flown by Chuck Yeager to first break the sound barrier in 1947 and even a P-59B Airacomet, a version of the country’s first jet.

There’s just one problem: Despite his title, Nelson doesn’t have a museum. Seven years after the start of the formal effort to develop one, many of the planes still sit scattered and exposed throughout the huge Mojave Desert base, the home of many aviation and aerospace pioneers.

Test pilots such as Yeager and Palmdale Mayor William J. (Pete) Knight may have set numerous speed and altitude records above Edwards’ famed dry lake beds in past decades. But the progress they and others have made in trying to build a museum chronicling those decades of history has been painfully slow.

“It was difficult to gain momentum when every time we tried to do something, we ran into roadblocks,” said Knight, a retired Air Force colonel who is chairman of the nonprofit group formed to build the museum. “But it’s time now to do something.”

Hampered by Air Force regulations that forbid the use of public funds for museum construction, stalled by the military’s own bureaucracy and forced to rely on volunteers in the past, museum backers are only now beginning an official fund-raising drive that they hope will collect $6 million for the museum.

Nelson, who was hired as the base’s civilian curator in 1986, said construction of the planned 60,000-square-foot building cannot even begin until after the money is raised. Supporters are confident that they will succeed, but the fund-raising alone is expected to take two to three years.

Major aerospace companies such as Lockheed, Rockwell International and Northrop Corp. are expected to be important donors. And supporters hope that the museum will become the anchor for a set of attractions dubbed the Antelope Valley Aerospace Heritage Trail, which will honor the region’s history.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration already has a visitors center at its facility at Edwards. The city of Lancaster in September unveiled its Aerospace Walk of Honor patterned after the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And a plan to display a pair of Blackbird spy planes at nearby Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale is progressing.

The museum at Edwards, however, is still more a wish than a reality. “Never in a million years did I think it was going to be this complicated,” said Nelson, a chief master sergeant who ended his 22-year Air Force career to take the curator’s job at Edwards.

If the Flight Test Historical Foundation can build the museum, base officials will support it with public funds at a cost that could hit several hundred thousand dollars a year. The facility would be one of seven Air Force base museums in California and one of 29 nationwide, officials said.

In early 1984, shortly after the foundation was formed, Edwards officials set aside a 335-acre site for the museum along Rosamond Boulevard, the base’s main access road. The base sought permission from the Pentagon in 1986 but did not get approval for the museum until February, 1990.

The delay was partly caused by a 1985 Air Force moratorium on new base museums that remains in effect today, although Edwards finally won an exception. During that time, the design plans for the base’s museum changed several times, and its projected size and cost both doubled.

An earlier plan called for a 30,000-square-foot building that would cost about $2.5 million. But after museum supporters decided that most of the planes should be displayed indoors, the cost skyrocketed to about $4.5 million for the 60,000-square-foot building, with the remaining funds targeted for related work.

The preliminary design shows a circular, 80-foot-high main exhibit hall flanked by twin, 40-foot-high halls. Many of the more than 50 planes would be displayed inside, including an SR-71 Blackbird hanging from the ceiling, but others, including the huge B-52, would be shown outside.

Nelson also envisions more than 80 displays on everything from the ancient formation of the base’s dry lake beds to Hollywood’s long history at Edwards. From the 1923 silent version of “The Ten Commandments” to Clint Eastwood’s 1982 movie “Firefox,” filmmakers have shot at locations in the area, Nelson said.

Other parts of the museum collection will include the top of the base’s former air traffic control tower, an old firetruck, a small railroad engine used at the base’s rocket lab and an array of flight helmets, patches, flags, gloves, goggles and other memorabilia.

Knight said the foundation--with trustees including former U. S. Sen. Barry Goldwater Sr. (R-Ariz.), Northrop Chief Executive Officer Thomas Jones and Yeager, a retired Air Force general--has hired New York-based Community Counseling Service to run the nationwide fund-raising drive at an expected cost of $250,000.

Presently, however, the only hints of the museum are five aircraft, including the B-52, on display in a sandy desert field near the museum site. Edwards officials started with three planes there in 1987, added a fourth in 1988 and finally the B-52 late last year.

Several more aircraft may be added, but not many more. Nelson said he doesn’t want to overdevelop the museum site in advance of building. He is also concerned about problems with the aircraft, which sit uncovered, getting dirty, faded by the desert sun and splattered by bird droppings.

One purpose of the outdoor display, dubbed the Jimmy Doolittle Airpark after the famous World War II aviator, is to give museum supporters something to show off to keep up interest in the museum. Nelson said he also hopes to open a small memorabilia display area in a converted drugstore on base by this fall.

“We’ve been talking about this since 1984, but we’ve had no place to tell our story. People keep saying, ‘When?’ It’s getting a little old saying, ‘Someday.’ I want to be able to start telling our story and creating a little bit of enthusiasm,” Nelson said.

The story of Edwards Air Force Base is one that’s virtually synonymous with military aviation and aerospace development in the United States. It goes back to the secrecy-shrouded flight of America’s first jet, the XP-59A, on Oct. 1, 1942, and continues through the modern space shuttle landings.

Located in the Antelope Valley about 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, the 301,000-acre base got its start in the early 1930s when the Army Air Corps used the dry lake beds for bombing and gunnery training. That led to use as a flight test center in the years after World War II.

In the decades since, most of the aircraft developed for the Air Force have been flight-tested at Edwards. Nelson said more than 100 aircraft have made their first takeoff or landing there, including the B-1 bomber in 1974, the space shuttle Columbia in 1981 and the B-2 Stealth bomber in 1989.

Those craft are still in use, but many of the older ones flown at Edwards have been getting rarer and harder to find, and some have disappeared entirely. One example is the YB-49, one of a series of experimental “flying wing” bombers developed in the 1940s that resembled the modern B-2.

Until more recent years, “nobody even thought of a museum at Edwards. We were all so busy working on our new projects that we let all the old ones go out the front door,” said Knight, who set a world speed record of 4,520 m.p.h.--nearly seven times the speed of sound--flying an X-15 in 1967.

Even today, many of the aircraft collected for the museum sit outside at unused flight-line locations on the base. Others are stored in buildings. And more than half a dozen others, including some of the rarest aircraft, for years have been parked at remote desert areas on the base.

Until the museum is built, there is no other place for them, Nelson said. Most will have to be restored, a long and time-consuming process, by volunteer workers at the base. Some planes are so badly deteriorated that two will have to be combined to make one whole aircraft.

For example, Nelson said, the B-52, by far the largest jet in the museum collection, took six years to be readied for display after its 1984 arrival at Edwards. Although the military still relies on B-52s, Edwards got the plane after it was succeeded by later, more advanced models.

Other planes include the first F-111A fighter-bomber built; an F-100 Super Sabre, the world’s first supersonic operational fighter; the sole surviving rocket-boosted Lockheed NF-104A Starfighter, and a Convair B-58A Hustler, a test version of the world’s first production supersonic bomber.