A restoration project for an airplane that once belonged to Jimmy Stewart was completed yesterday as the plane was installed outside the Jimmy Stewart Airport.
Jimmy’s 1961 Cessna 310 went up on a pole on the airport property on Wednesday. The plane was found five years ago in Dallas, Texas, and it was disassembled and brought to Indiana for crews to work on it at the airport. The team that restored the airplane, the Indiana Chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association, worked a few years on the project to restore the plane to how it looked when Jimmy owned it, including finding propellers to match the plane, rebuilding fiberglass parts and even getting the right color paint for the plane.
Once it was complete, there were plans for it to be fixed to a pole and for it to be stationary, but project leader Harold Wood said that they wanted to make it a movable item, with it able to move like a weather vane and have the propellers in motion when the wind blows. Wood said that addition was the hardest part of the project.
The plane was featured at the Jimmy Stewart Airport Festival and in a Veterans Day Parade in 2017.
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