California air museum wants war birds from Barbers Point facility

Preservation of several historic war birds is tantalizingly close for the former Naval Air Museum Barbers Point.

The museum at Kalaeloa Airport closed in late 2019, making way for construction of Million Air Honolulu, a $12 million private jet terminal. The closure put the museum’s collection of aircraft and artifacts in limbo.

Officials at Castle Air Museum in Atwater, Calif., about 100 miles east of San Jose, are hoping to get some of the Barbers Point aircraft if they can find a way to ship them to California.

Ten of the museum aircraft at Barbers Point were on loan from the National Naval Aviation Museum.

Castle Air Museum said it has Navy approval to accept five of them, including a Marine Corps CH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter, a big transport that flew for years out of Kaneohe Bay.

Castle also has approval for a Navy UH-3H Sea King, AH-1W Cobra and SH-60 Seahawk — all helicopters — as well as an A-4 Skyhawk attack jet that purportedly was used in the movie “Top Gun,” said museum Executive Director Joe Pruzzo.

Pruzzo said a Hawaiian Airlines volunteer crew is ready to disassemble the aircraft. A trucking company in California has volunteered to provide local transportation.

The Castle Air Museum wants the aircraft in its collection.

But it has got to get the war birds across the Pacific — and that’s where it’s hoping that the Air Force or Navy can step in so it can hitch a ride on a big-deck ship or cargo plane heading that way in what’s known as “opportune lift.” The museum is open to civilian sea-lift as well.

“If we can move them, no problem — they (the Navy) will loan them to us,” Pruzzo said in a phone interview. “We’re already on the books with the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola (Fla.) for those airframes. Worst-case scenario: We can’t move them and ultimately they get scrapped.”

The San Joaquin Valley museum, adjacent to the former Castle Air Force Base, has nearly 75 aircraft, “but we’re a little light on helicopters, and these helicopters coming available (on Oahu) have significant pedigree,” he said.

They’re also a great deal. By contrast, the museum was quoted a price of $157,000 for demilitar­ization and parts retrieval to get a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter out of the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Ariz., Pruzzo said.

That museum’s interest stands in contrast to the ongoing deterioration that the Oahu aircraft — including a DC-8 passenger jet, two P-3 Orion sub hunters and a Coast Guard C-130 — have experienced since the shoestring Naval Air Museum Barbers Point closed.

A rare two-man movable concrete pillbox that wound up at the now-defunct Kalaeloa museum also is slated for preservation.

Ewa historian John Bond said the cylindrical pillboxes were likely one of the first defensive constructions following the Pearl Harbor attack.

“At the time there was huge fear of an imminent Japanese invasion,” Bond said. Four of the pillboxes were constructed and placed “in a classic quadrant array” to protect the Ewa Field runway from a possible Japanese paratrooper or glider raid, he said.

The mainland aircraft services partnership that plans to build Million Air Honolulu, a luxury “fixed-base operation” and fuel farm at Kalaeloa Airport near the location of the former air museum — and where some of its aircraft are still located — hopes to save the pillbox and incorporate it into the entrance to its planned FBO.

Freeman Holdings of Hawaii is the owner of Million Air Honolulu. Excavators recently operated near the pillbox while working on what will become a new fuel farm. A draft environmental assessment released in February said the venture conceptually could include a metal-and-glass building with an executive airport terminal/lobby, conference room and pilot lounge as well as a new hangar.

“We are enamored by the pillbox and its history and will make sure nothing happens to it,” Scott Freeman, with the Freeman Holdings Group, said in an email to Bond.

About a dozen of the Barbers Point museum aircraft were owned by the Defense Department. Some moved just a short distance across the airfield to the museum when Naval Air Station Barbers Point closed in 1999 — including a P-3 Orion, an F-4N Phantom and three Skyhawks.

The collection also still includes 60-ton M-60 Patton tanks, armored personnel carriers and other aircraft and vehicles. The state Department of Transportation has since been stuck with much of it on the airfield or parked nearby.

Roy Sakata, Oahu airports district manager for the state Department of Transportation, has been working with historian Bond and others to find other homes for the relics as redevelopment plans tick forward.

“I need to remove the pillbox soonest,” Sakata emphasized in mid-July. DOT said in a statement that it continues to “communicate with federal interests regarding ownership and disposition” of the aircraft and equipment left at Kalaeloa Airport.

The National Naval Aviation Museum is planning a late-summer site visit to check up on nine of its aircraft.

Pruzzo said Sakata “really wants to help us, and small world, because he told me that in the early ’70s he came through what was then Castle Air Force Base for KC-135 (refueling aircraft) pilot training.”

Bond said Sakata told him the state plan for the DC-8 is to take off the wings and tail and turn it into some sort of training facility. The tanks would be picked up by the Army, possibly to be used as targets, he said.

Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum on Ford Island took an A-4 jet, but that museum is focused predominately on Dec. 7, 1941, and World War II.

Bond said he was “most concerned” with the two P-3s — four-engine propeller aircraft that defined Barbers Point and later the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps base for decades.

Sakata related that “the plan right now is to turn (those aircraft) over to the scrap people” to be chopped up, Bond said.

But Bond has an alternative suggestion. There are nearby T-hangars, “and that whole back area (of the airport) is hugely wide open,” he said.

An old DC-6 used by the National Response Center for oil spills is parked nearby, and Bond said the P-3s, F-4 Phantom and Coast Guard C-130 could be parked there, too — with volunteer upkeep to do basic maintenance.

“You could probably get some Coast Guard or Navy people that would like to do that,” he said.

He also points out that RIMPAC 2022 maritime exercises will be held next summer, and Hawaii is “going to be flooded with (military) transports. That would present a lot of opportunities” to get the aircraft sought by Castle Air Museum to the West Coast, he said.