A Capital Region aerospace museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
The Empire State Aerosciences Museum is based at the former General Electric test flight facility at the Schenectady County Airport in Glenville.
Visitors to the museum are greeted by a scale model of a Concorde — white, with a tail emblazoned with blue and red stripes — and a huge hangar. Walk through the first exhibits, and you’ll see biplanes and the cabin of a Lockheed Electra set up as Amelia Earhart’s would have been.
Keep going on to the main gallery and restoration center in the hangar and a you find a Tiger II — better known as the “MiG-28” from “Top Gun.”
Look up, and there are gliders galore, including the one-of-a-kind Rensselaer RP-1, built by RPI students in 1980.
Presenting the museum with a state proclamation, New York state Senator Jim Tedisco of the 44th district says there’s nothing else like it.
“You’ve got what I would call the Taj Mahal of science and aeroscience museums of our airplanes. What a tremendous history is illustrated here,” Tedisco said.
In addition to the planes inside, those on display outside include John Piersma’s Mooney M-18 Mite “Half Pint.”
Joyce Newkirk, the museum treasurer, thanked founders Carl Battaglia, Ernie Tetrault, James Delmonaco and Steven Israel, saying the museum has exceeded her expectations.
“They had this dream that we should start preserving what we've had here. This airport is owned by the county, and very few airports are owned by the county in which they live. So that was their dream, and it has materialized into a much bigger thing than we thought,” Newkirk said.
State Assemblymember Mary Beth Walsh of the 112th District, a fellow Republican, also presented the museum with a proclamation.
“In celebration of 40 years and in honoring its founders, volunteers, and supporters for their dedication and contribution to preserving and promoting aviation history, and we extend our best wishes for the museum’s continued success and growth in the years to come," Walsh said.
Dan Wilson is museum president.
“It's very exciting, and we're looking forward to the next 40 years. You know, we're surrounded by retired engineers, Air Force people. We got pilots that are 777 pilots on our board now, very diverse group, lawyers, doctors and, like I said, 40 years of [an] all-volunteer organization,” Wilson said
ESAM volunteer John Panowski says assembling the collection wasn’t easy, relating a story of how the museum acquired its first plane, an F-4.
“We got that out of Niagara Falls, and that came down on the Old Erie Canal on a barge. And it took us 12 days to get it here, because they don't operate at night,” Panowski said.
And they had to do it again when they brought up three more planes off the USS Intrepid in New York City; one at a time because that portion of the Erie Canal is only 35 feet wide.
“There are 10 total lifts between the federal lock and the locks between Scotia, it took over 10 hours to get it here. And I thought it would be close to half an hour to an hour. Each one was 40 minutes,” Panowski said.
In addition to planes, the museum has several helicopters on display, including a Bell UH-1C “Mike” from 1965. Robert Comtois is a museum volunteer and Army veteran who went to Vietnam the same year as the museum’s chopper was made and worked on ones like it overseas.
“It was a war zone, but I enjoyed the work I was doing, flying around in them, going picking up people, dropping off people in the LZs [Landing Zones], in the smaller helicopter I flew around is a scout aircraft, so we look for things on the ground, bunker complexes, buildings, people,” Comtois said.
Comtois says he’s been volunteering here for three years, and says the helicopter is a favorite with kids, who always have questions:
“How does it work? Where's the engine? You know, how fast does it go? How high can it go? These, all these questions, what's this stick do? What the stick do, what do these pedals do?” Comtois said.
Comtois says the engine is currently in a different helicopter in Rochester, with a schematic filling in.
This week’s celebration also included a gala Thursday night ahead of a screening of “Top Gun” tonight.
