Its eyes stare menacingly at you, and its open mouth reveals many jagged teeth. Its nose, pared down to a sharp point, looks dangerous. Not even a concrete wall, it seems, can hold back this mean machine.

 

The refurbished F-4 Phantom fighter jet cockpit on display in the Flight City: St. Louis Takes to the Air exhibit at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. Photograph © 2007, Missouri Historical Society.

The “machine” is a refurbished F-4 Phantom fighter jet cockpit that is one of the main attractions of Flight City: St. Louis Takes to the Air, a current exhibit at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.

The F-4 Phantom fits perfectly into its own section of the West Gallery, where visitors can appreciate its craftsmanship and impeccable detailing, but its path to the Museum wasn’t always a smooth ride.

F-4 Phantom models were built in the late 1950s to late 1970s and were used by the air forces of many countries in addition to the United States. Known for their reliability and speed, these planes were flown in the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm. The German air force used the F-4 Phantom cockpit that appears in Flight City, until the plane suffered an engine fire in 1996 and was deemed beyond repair. “Instead of scrapping the entire plane, the cockpit was separated from the fuselage and was sent to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the Germans train for the F-4’s,” explains Joe Steimann, an F-4 Phantom enthusiast and aviation artifact collector from Missouri.

 

				The F-4 was stripped of its parts and lying dormant in a scrap yard in New Mexico when Joe Steimann bought it. Photograph, 2003. Courtesy of Joe Steimann.

After the F-4 Phantom series was decommissioned, the plane was sent to a scrap yard in New Mexico, stripped of its parts, and left to rust. When Steimann learned of the plane in August 2003, he decided to purchase and refurbish it. Steimann, who works for the 131st Fighter Wing of the Missouri Air National Guard at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, owns a huge collection of aviation parts and had always dreamt of building a cockpit. He worked for the next 10 months restoring the F-4, spending much of the time acquiring the missing parts, including traveling to Seattle and Tucson to retrieve pieces. The restoration process included recovering access panels, ejection seats, canopies, and consoles, among other things. Fortunately, with his technical background in repairing tears to sheet metal with the Air National Guard, he was able to follow the F-4 technical manual to fabricate the missing panels.

The F-4 weighs between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds and has to be lifted onto and off of the trailer with a crane. Photograph, 2003. Courtesy of Joe Steimann.

In restoring the plane to its former glory, Steimann did make a couple of alterations. The F-4 Phantom was a model F (for the German air force), but he converted it into a model E (for the U.S. Air Force) to commemorate the one used by the 131st Fighter Wing. “There are very few differences in the models,” he explained. “For example, the horizontal stab[ilator]s are slotted on the E model but not on the F.” In addition, he gave the plane a face, as well as a personality, by painting on expressive eyes, a ferocious mouth, and a sharp nose. “I wanted it to look as if it was flying for them,” Steimann said. “It’s a duplicate of the Missouri National Guard model.”

The F-4 Phantom cockpit weighs between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds and is 28 feet long. After he completed the restoration, Steimann had to have a trailer built and use a crane to hoist it on the trailer. Once it was mobile, he began taking the F-4 on the local air show and aviation event circuit.

	Joe Steimann, refurbisher of the F-4 Phantom, talks about his experiences at air shows.

Meanwhile, the Exhibits team at the Missouri Historical Society was busy planning the Flight City exhibit. In April 2006, Flight City exhibition designer and project manager Margaret Koch began doing research on how to obtain a military plane cockpit for the exhibit. “We didn’t have room for an entire plane in our gallery,” she explained, “and we really wanted to do an F-4 because it really revolutionized fighting and was the plane of the Vietnam era.”

Koch spent time working with several organizations, including AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center), which locates and manages demilitarized and decommissioned planes for the U.S. military. “There are rows and rows of these types of planes owned by the Air Force and Navy,” she said. She had to contact the curators at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (NMUSAF) to start the process of getting a plane. “The Air Force has a certification process for institutions to be able to exhibit [its] craft on loan,” she said. “We sent our application in early September.” While waiting for an official letter of certification, she was in frequent contact with AMARC and the NMUSAF and searching their databases for the right plane.

Overhead view of the pilot’s seat before the plane was refurbished. All military planes have to be demilitarized to remove and destroy any radioactive equipment and anything combustible or deemed a matter of national security. Photograph, 2003. Courtesy of Joe Steimann.

When the letter of certification arrived, it was almost December, six months before the exhibit would debut. NMUSAF curators felt there was still enough time to get a cockpit. “In early February, I went to Tucson to look at the planes and take a tour,” she said. “There were two good candidates, either of which the NMUSAF was willing to have demilitarized and sliced to loan us a cockpit.” It seemed to be just a matter of finalizing paperwork and logistics before a plane would be shipped to the History Museum. Unfortunately, when the estimate for the costs and time frame arrived from AMARC in April, both numbers had climbed considerably. “The time frame for demilitarizing had jumped from 2 1/2 weeks to 8 weeks,” Koch recalled. “We would have to raise more money and open the exhibit without the plane.”

As the opening date for the exhibit was getting closer, Jody Sowell, an oral historian assigned to Flight City, was interviewing Steimann for a series on St. Louisans who are involved in the aerospace industry. “In the course of the oral history, Joe asked if we would be interested in the lease of his cockpit,” Koch said. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Steimann’s trailer was made for highway travel, which was not adequate for a gallery exhibit. He immediately began working on parameters for a new trailer, while Koch began figuring out how to bring an F-4 into the Museum. The Flight City exhibit was originally slated for the East Gallery. To bring in the plane, it would have to be transported through the West Gallery, which connects to the Museum's loading zone, across the Museum’s Grand Hall, and through the entrance to the East Gallery. “When Joe gave me final dimensions of his F-4, we only had an eighth of an inch of clearance total. It was too risky,” Koch said. “We had visions of the F-4 being stuck in the Grand Hall and not able to get moved into the East Gallery.” With another exhibit scheduled in the East Gallery at the same time, Koch sought and got permission to switch the galleries. “That made it a lot less stressful,” she said.

During installation, the trailer carrying the F-4 was backed up to the Museum loading dock so that workers could pull and push the plane onto the dock. Photograph © 2007, Missouri Historical Society.

On the day of arrival, Steimann supervised the loading of the F-4 onto the custom-built trailer an hour away in Winfield, Missouri. The trucking company had to get a special permit from the highway patrol to transport the plane. “The highway patrol routed them on a lot of back highways,” Koch said.

Although the F-4 arrived at MHS without incident, the plane came very close to scraping the underside of an overpass. “I was looking back to make sure I didn’t have to stop and pick up any pieces of the plane,” Steimann said.

Once the plane arrived at the Museum, the trailer was backed up to the loading dock. Steimann had requested that the trailer's wheels be able to rotate 360 degrees, which made it easy to nose the wheels onto the dock and back the plane against the Gallery wall.

“All the months of preparation, the measuring and re-measuring, paid off,” Koch said. “Once the plane got to the loading dock, it was in the gallery within 20 minutes, which is pretty amazing to me.”

The F-4 Phantom, as well as many other aviation-related artifacts, will be on display until September 28, 2008.

 

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