Dozens of detailers restore historic airplanes
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 12:26PM BIG BEAR LAKE, CA — An elite team of 40 detailers worked here to restore a rare World War II bomber and the original Air Force One for exhibition at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, according to a press release.
The Aug. 12 release stated that one member of the detailing team was 17-year-old high school senior Ryan Hester Doyle. Doyle is cleaning the airplanes as her senior career project.
Ryan aspires to become a helicopter pilot for the U.S. military. “Our senior project is supposed to be related in some way to our potential career or something we are interested in doing. Getting to detail Air Force One and the B29 bomber was perfect,” Ryan said in the release.
The shrapnel-torn B29 bomber had never been cleaned or detailed since it was abandoned on a desert airfield in Arizona. Air Force One had been exposed to the elements for the past three years while on display at the museum.
“Both planes were in terrible shape,” Doyle’s father, Renny Doyle, said in the press release. Renny owns a detailing training facility, and he coordinated and supervised the plane detailing event. “Ryan has been detailing cars and airplanes all her life. She knew this was a tedious, time-consuming, dirty job; but she loves it and she is good enough to be a member of the team.”
Ryan used paint polishes, aluminum polish and a dual action orbital polisher to restore sections of both planes. “I got to work on the paint and the brightwork under the right wing, on some of the belly, various areas along the fuselage, and up on the nose of the plane,” Ryan said in the release, “I also had to clean the pads after they had been used to get the gunk off.”
Reader Comments