Public can visit hangar at Air & Space Museum starting Thursday

Exhibit maintenance technician Larry Markel cleans a Hilton Lark 95 as an SR-71 Blackbird rests in the background in the new Spirit of Freedom Hangar at the Pima Air & Space Museum.

The Pima Air & Space Museum’s impressive Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the only remaining Martin PBM-5A Mariner and other rare aircraft have a new home.

The museum will inaugurate its newly constructed, 42,000-square-foot Spirit of Freedom Hangar at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, said Daniel Ryan, the museum’s executive director.

The event “is a private ribbon-cutting for our members and donors, but the new addition will be open to the public at 9 a.m. on Thursday,” he said.

At this time the Spirit of Freedom Hangar will house about 10 aircraft, but there will be more later, Ryan said.

The hangar will also be home to one of the two surviving North American F-107 aircraft and will house the Arizona Aviation Hall of Fame, he said.

“Only three of those were built. One crashed in testing, and the other is at the Dayton, Ohio, air museum,” Ryan said of the F-107. “It is a one-of-a-kind aircraft.”

The new exhibition boasts the only surviving PBM-5A Mariner.

“About 1,200 were built, but this is the only one in existence in the entire world,” Ryan said.

The Blackbird is not as rare, because “about a dozen are on display around the country,” Ryan said. The Cold War spy plane could fly at three times the speed of sound and at 85,000 feet.

The hangar cost $3.6 million, mostly paid by contributions to the museum and a $1 million matching grant by Pima County, a news release said.

The new addition triples the hangar space of the museum and will also be used to host community, private and business events, the release said.

The museum is the largest of its kind west of the Rockies, the third largest in the country and serves almost 200,000 visitors a year, Ryan said. “There are nearly 300 aircraft on display here.”

Source: Pima Air & Space Museum

ABOVE: Don Campbell, 78, cleans displays inside the Arizona Aviation Hall of Fame. LEFT: This is a detail of the artwork on an S-3B Viking.

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Pima Air & Space Museum: www.pimaair.org

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