WWII plane to make China trip

Too expensive to fly, owners sell NLR C-47 to museum

 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL --11/20/14-- Russell Forehand with Dodson Aviation walks past a Douglas C-47 Thursday at the North Little Rock Airport. Dodson Aviation is taking the plane apart for shipping to China where it will be displayed in a museum.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL --11/20/14-- Russell Forehand with Dodson Aviation walks past a Douglas C-47 Thursday at the North Little Rock Airport. Dodson Aviation is taking the plane apart for shipping to China where it will be displayed in a museum.

One of the few remaining examples of a legendary aircraft, one that flew all over the world before finding a home at the North Little Rock Municipal Airport, is making one more journey for history's sake.

Only on this trip, the Douglas C-47 Skytrain will travel by boat to China, where it will be displayed to honor the efforts of the Allies in World War II to supply the Chinese with food, arms and other supplies. Its display in a museum in Lvliang, a city in the Shanxi province several hours southwest of Beijing, will also pay homage to a mysterious crash just after the war that took the lives of several Chinese government officials.

The aircraft's Arkansas owners, Harry Barrett and Bob Partyka, sold the aircraft to a museum in China after bitterly concluding that they could no longer afford the expense of making it airworthy.

Barrett, the owner of Barrett Aviation, a general aviation center at the airport, and Partyka of Little Rock expressed both disappointment and relief that the aircraft has a new owner.

"Our goal was to make it airworthy," Barrett said last week. "But obviously it became too expensive to do that."

Just running the big aircraft's two 1,200-horsepower radial engines cost several hundred dollars in fuel and oil, he said. On top of that, it was expensive to keep it parked at the airport and keep it insured.

Barrett helped ferry the aircraft to the airport about eight years ago from its previous home in Texarkana. But that was its last flight.

"We did get it pretty much flyable," he said. "It could fly. I would've loved to have been able to do it again."

He and Partyka envisioned getting it in flying condition once more, painting it in the distinctive markings of aircraft flown in support of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and flying it to air shows.

"I'm not happy about it," Partyka said of the decision to sell the Skytrain. "But we had very little choice. It's not what we wanted to do, but you don't always get to do what you want to do."

The plane and its new owners appear to be a good fit, too.

The aircraft now is actually a registered DC-3, its civilian designation. It was built near the end of War World II as the military version, of which more than 10,000 were built.

The C-47 could carry up to 6,000 pounds of cargo, according to Boeing, the successor to Douglas Aircraft. It could also hold a fully assembled jeep or a 37 mm cannon.

As a troop transport, it carried 28 soldiers in full combat gear. As a medical airlift plane, it could accommodate 14 patients on stretchers and three nurses.

When it was built, Barrett and Partyka's plane was destined for the Royal Canadian Air Force, which transferred it to the Royal Air Force of Great Britain, according to what Barrett and others have pieced together.

The RAF used it in the China Burma India theater of the war, where it likely flew missions over "The Hump," the famed eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains over which Allied crews ferried supplies for the Chinese army and American military aviation units.

The aircraft was a B model, which indicated design improvements that made it possible to fly heavy cargo at the high altitudes needed to get over "The Hump." The improvements included twin turbochargers on each engine.

After the war, the plane wound up in Yemen, where it served for several years for an airline, before returning to the nation that originally bought it, to once again haul cargo.

For a time, it was flying to and from the North Pole after being equipped with skis to land on ice and snow. Then it was on to Indiana and then North Carolina.

The aircraft eventually ended up in Texarkana, where it served as a ground-based trainer for people learning to be aircraft mechanics at Southern Arkansas University Tech, which is where Barrett and Partyka bought it.

Last week, the airplane was parked in a corner of the airport. Or what was left of it was. A crew from Mena Aerospace, a division of Dodson Aviation, has been carefully disassembling the aircraft.

Mike Quillin, a member of the crew, pointed to the tens of thousands of nuts and bolts that kept the plane together that he and the rest of the workers were removing.

"They were built to be fixed and go forever," he said.

By Thursday, the big radial engines, wings and vertical stabilizer, or tail, had been removed. The crew was preparing to use two cranes to remove the fuselage from the wing root.

"This is a big project," said Andy Justice, a mechanic for Mena Aerospace.

A bigger project might be Chinese customs, which workers discovered belatedly might not accept the 2x4 pieces of lumber used to build the crates.

Overseeing the project for the museum is Sam Di, who hired Mena Aerospace and is arranging for the trucks needed to take the aircraft to Houston, where it will be loaded aboard a ship for a month-long voyage to China.

The Lvliang museum allows people to "learn the history of the Chinese liberation and to learn about the crash," Di said.

A C-47 carrying 13 or 14 people, depending on the source, crashed in bad weather on April 8, 1946, near Lvliang, on a flight from Chongqing to Yan'an.

The plane was an American military aircraft flown by a military crew, said Jeff Kyong-McClain, an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and authority on modern China.

At the time, the United States was trying to head off a civil war in China between the nationalists and communists. The government officials aboard the aircraft were communists imprisoned by nationalist forces. Americans had negotiated their release, Kyong-McClain said.

"This was the early stages of trying to keep a lid on the civil war," he said. "Ultimately that failed. This was one piece of that puzzle."

Metro on 11/24/2014

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