Butch Garner, Liberty Jump Team senior jump master, on Saturday turned a few young recruits into a team of pretend paratroopers inside the belly of the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum’s WWII C-47 Skytrain.

“Get your right hand on the ripcord,” yelled Garner, a retired Army sergeant who earned a Purple Heart as a result of enemy action in Vietnam. “Get ready, six minutes. Hook up. Check slack. Sound off for equipment check.”

Garner surveyed the young crew and seeing nothing amiss, yelled: “All OK jump master. Go! Go! Go!”

And away they went on a ground journey that spoke to the power of imagination and taking a leap. For just a moment, it seemed like they were airborne. Big dreams can do that.

Exploration was the theme at Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum during the Boy Scouts of America Aloha Council’s Onizuka Day of Exploration, where the Liberty Jump Team made its first Hawaii appearance. The museum’s first public event since the COVID-19 pandemic started honored the memory of Hawaii-born astronaut Ellison Onizuka, whose life ended in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.

During the event, Boy Scouts, their families and others had an opportunity to meet Claude Onizuka, Ellison’s younger brother, who was joined by NASA astronaut Michael Barratt.

“I want them to understand that space flight is amazing but they can do it if they work hard and are determined; they don’t have to be geniuses,” Barratt said. “We need new engineers and space flight professionals. We don’t have nearly the workforce that we need. It pays us forward to stimulate and inspire these guys.”

Onizuka said his brother, who was an Eagle Scout, would have been very pleased with Saturday’s event and with Barratt’s appearance, which was underwritten by American Savings Bank.

“He’d be very happy looking down on today. When Ellison came back to Hawaii he always wanted to visit schools,” he said. “He wanted to get the students excited to open up their minds for exploration and to set higher goals for themselves.”

The Liberty Jump Team also supported STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) by conducting airborne ground demonstrations, teaching visitors about the history of the Airborne Infantry and performing training exercises on the museum’s C-47.

Scott Freund, a former military police officer who is a member of the Liberty Jump Team’s board, said the group began in 2006 when the mayor of Carentan, France, asked to include an airborne demonstration in its D-Day commemoration of the June 6, 1944, invasion of Europe.

Freund said the Liberty Jump Team has since performed military-style, static-line parachute jumps from C-47 aircraft in historic drop zones that were used by paratroopers during the invasion.

The team members, who include civilians as well as active-duty military and retirees, range in age from 18 to 83 and come from many countries. Jumpers regularly travel throughout the U.S. and are slated to return to Normandy in June.

But Freund couldn’t contain his excitement about the team’s first opportunity to provide ground demonstrations in Hawaii, where jump team member Tracie Hunter, an Emmy- award winning filmmaker, was holding the Hawaii premiere of “A Rendezvous with Destiny.”

“We are at the place where the war started. If nothing would have happened here, WWII wouldn’t have taken place and our paratroopers wouldn’t have been in Normandy, France,” Freund said. “This is that start of it all, and that’s why we came here, to be part of all of that.”

Hunter’s film, which is a project of her nonprofit Beyond the Call, centers around three of the last remaining 101st Airborne Division “Screaming Eagles”: Jim “Pee Wee” Martin, Dan McBride and Dick Klein.

Hunter, who moved to Hawaii in 2021, said she and partnering filmmakers Ashley Andrews and Elizabeth Suter are on a mission to share as many WWII veterans’ stories as they can before the “Greatest Generation” is gone.

Hunter said she grew so close to McBride while making “A Rendezvous with Destiny” that he inspired her to learn to parachute and join the Liberty Jump Team.

“I remember the night before my first jump thinking, ‘I’m going to die tomorrow,’” Hunter said. “But when I got there the adrenaline kicked in and I thought, ‘Dan McBride, my WWII veteran, is watching and I am not going to let him down.’”

A similar tenacity is shared by the museum, whose mission is to steward America’s first aviation battlefield of WWII.

Elissa Lines, executive director of the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, said the museum is on its way back after a 10-month pandemic-related closure.

“Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum is excited to host Onizuka Day 2022 in partnership with the Boy Scouts of Hawaii — a special day that marks our first event since the pandemic began over two years ago,” Lines said in an email.

During the closure, she said, the museum’s historic structures, aircraft and artifacts still had to be maintained.

The museum was “spending money even as we were losing it,” Lines said. “Like many organizations, this is a recovery year for us.”

She said the museum is currently earning 80% of the revenue that it earned in 2019, its last full year before the pandemic.

“While we are proud to have kept the doors of history open — both virtually and literally — over the last two years, there is much left to do,” Lines said.

The museum’s biggest project to date, the restoration of the Ford Island Control Tower, will open on Memorial Day, she said.

“Bringing this iconic structure back to life has been a decade-long project,” Lines said. “We continue to raise funds for further restoration and exhibits to honor the Pearl Harbor story throughout our campus.”