Aircraft data plates

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Snautzer01 said:
With a bit of luck one could find a picture of the planes.
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It looks like one of them, the C-53, didn't go to the smelter after all. (The scrap yard was surrounded by houses and the company was only allowed to run the smelter a few days every year.) It's listed as being in a museum in North Carolina, so I called and left a message with them about the plate. We'll see if they reply. It would be great to see it reunited with the aircraft that it was originally on!
 
Heard back from the aviation museum, and the data plate for their C-53/Piedmont Airlines plane is packed and ready to mail to them, to put back in the spot where I removed it from 51 years ago. Now to see if I can find out whether the DC-3A whose data plate I also removed still exists somewhere...
 
That's great. I love it when a plan(e) comes together.
 
I found out that BOTH of the data plates were off this same plane. The Army Air Corps one represented its original build as a C-53, the Douglas Aircraft one showed its postwar conversion to DC-3 configuration. It went to Western Airlines then, and finally to Piedmont Airlines, then to our scrapyard and now to a museum. So I put both of the data plates in the mail this afternoon.
 
Entry from Joe Baughers site

Douglas C-53-DO, 41-20130 (MSN 4900) to USAAF Mar 24, 1942. To RFC Jan 10, 1945. To civil registry as NC18600 (DPC - Western Airlines, leased until bought Aug 1, 1949), N56V (Piedmont 'Potomac Pacemaker' Jan 12, 1956 - Charlotte Aircraft Corp, NC 1963 - Augusta Richmond County Museum - North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, pole-mounted at Raleigh/Durham IAP). Plans to transfer the plane to North Carolina Transportation Museum, Spencer, NC during 2004
 
The reference to Charlotte Aircraft - that's the scrapyard where I worked during summers in 1971-73. From other sources it appears that it left there in 1978. Apparently it spent all of WW2 stateside, in the training role. I wish I'd had some financial resources back then, in the back lot there was a P-80A fuselage, and 2 crated up F-86s. The boss said I could buy the P-80A for $100 but he'd have to get $200 for either of the two Sabres. I wasn't working for fun, I had to earn money every summer to cover the next year's college tuition, and at $1.35 an hour (minus taxes) I wasn't going to accumulate any extra cash for splurges like that. I did lay out $20 for an ejection seat out of an F-89 though, and it's still sitting in my storage building...
 
LOL - sent the data plates to the museum, got an email that they'd arrived, but then was told that I actually have to go through an official process involving paperwork. I have to fill out and return a Receipt of Temporary Custody first. Then when they receive that, the museum has to send a request (a request to be allowed to keep a donation!) to the State Historical Commission, and when (if?) they approve the donation, they'll send me a Deed of Gift to be signed and returned. Silly me, I just assumed I could replace what I took 50 years ago, and that museums could accept donations. (Not a single "thank you" in the correspondence, either!)
 
Unbelievable. I had a similar story with some B-36 parts I wanted to donate several years ago. Local museums said they weren't relevant and didn't even want them!
 
Sabrejet said:
Unbelievable. I had a similar story with some B-36 parts I wanted to donate several years ago. Local museums said they weren't relevant and didn't even want them!
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I'm actually thinking of telling them to just send the plates back to me. It might send somebody a message that ordinary people are fed up with nonsensical bureaucratic processes that must exist solely to justify someone to sit in a tax-funded position and do unnecessary paperwork.
 
The C-53/DC-3 data plates that I mentioned in a post last week turned out to be for the same aircraft at different points in its life, so my half-century-old memory of taking them from 2 different airplanes was wrong. The initial response I got from someone at the museum that has the airplane now was muted, but then a couple of other people got in the loop and one of them practically exploded with excitement because she'd spent the better part of a decade searching everywhere for those very plates! So that just leaves one plate missing that I couldn't pry loose at the time. At some point in this plane's life that plate was mounted on a plaque that was supposed to honor the aircraft's history with the airline that flew it, but that plaque has disappeared. A photo of the plate has survived though, and if anyone knows where it might be, please respond. There are plate collectors out there, and who knows? Maybe it actually does still exist. I know someone who would be ecstatic beyond words if it could be found.

 
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