How the Intrepid Museum Preserves Aviation History

Aviation heritage takes on many forms and is carried on by people from all walks of life, tackling tasks that are crucial to the preservation of the historic monuments that these aircraft are.

Among this group are museum staff and volunteers around the country that showcase the skills and dedication necessary for this mission, down to the smallest technical detail, though their work is sometimes less visible to the public.

On the Hudson River along the western shore of New York City, one such place is the Intrepid Museum. The aircraft carrier USS Intrepid launched in 1943 and took part in World War II, the Vietnam War, and recovery for space missions. It has been a museum since 1982 and contains military aircraft from the 1940s onward, the Concorde supersonic airliner, and the space shuttle Enterprise, seeing around 1 million visitors a year from all over the world.

Here, staff work behind the scenes on the museum’s extensive artifact collection, among which is a team specifically dedicated to maintaining the aircraft that are such a core part of the nation’s history.

Providing appropriate preservation care to museum aircraft always presents unique difficulties, but even more so at the Intrepid Museum, where many of the aircraft sit on the carrier’s flight deck in humid and salt-rich air, exposed to ultraviolet light and battered by the elements year-round. It takes a full-time team and an on-site workshop to keep these aircraft maintained and safe, ready for display and preserved for survival long into the future.

The aircraft that represent our history, even those not returned to glamorous flying condition, deserve just as much care and dedication from maintenance teams. It’s a lot of work that isn’t as high-profile as shops for flying warbirds but just as crucial to the aviation community.

Work Behind the Work

On the Intrepid’s flight deck stands a hangar workshop, and it nearly always has an aircraft inside on a maintenance rotation, with one side of the building full of large windows so visitors can watch the “renovation,” as Peter Torraca, manager of aircraft restoration for the museum, refers to it.

“We call it a restoration shop, but it’s kind of like restoration ‘lite’ in there,” Torraa said. “We’re not over-hauling engines. We’re not doing anything super technical. There’s a lot of these aircraft that need to be preserved in a museum setting, because that’s going to be what [will need to happen to] them in the long haul to be available for generations and for people that are being introduced to these things.”

When one of the museum’s aircraft is due for a renovation, it is moved into the shop and disassembled as much as possible. All surfaces are sanded down to remove paint, and the aircraft is inspected in detail to check all parts and look for signs of damage or corrosion. Then it is repaired as needed, repainted, and reassembled with careful documentation made at each step.

“The paint that we use essentially has more in common with your average house paint than a high-tech aerospace coating,” Torraca said. “Because these aircraft made the transition from flying aircraft to outdoor artifacts, we have to look at it from the angle of how best can we preserve these things with the nonstop UV exposure and the high salt content in the air because we’re so close to the ocean.”

The shop is excellently equipped for anything the staff would need to do, from sheet metal repair to riveting and other basic mechanical work. If a component is needed that it is not capable of reproducing in-house, it will start looking around bone-yards and other museums or military connections.

“We’ve gotten a surprising amount of stuff from Pensacola [Florida],” Torraca said. “We’ve got like 19 U.S. Navy airplanes here, and they’re very happy with the way we take care of their stuff.”

The full-time staff of the Intrepid restoration team includes Torraca and Richard Skolnick, who spent 28 years managing Delta Air Lines maintenance at John F. Kennedy International Airport (KJFK) and 12 years teaching at Aviation High School in Long Island City. Part-time staff member Nick Riedel brings a plethora of skills from an automotive background, and a score of volunteers with varied skills dedicate scheduled time to the projects.

Torraca describes the teamwork as a “pretty jovial experience,” with a high level of camaraderie. Typical wear and tear or small accidents in the normal routine are efficiently repaired by the team and volunteers. It’s a system that works smoothly to have the aircraft staying in their best condition.

Caring for Legends

One of the more high-profile renovations the museum team has completed recently was on a British Airways Concorde that was in dire need of refreshing after years of exposure on the flight deck. The team undertook the huge task of repainting and making minor repairs on the storied aircraft.

Since the Concorde would not fit in the restoration hangar, a location had to be secured at an open pier at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A barge was brought alongside Intrepid, while another barge with a crane lifted the Concorde onto it and began the careful process of traveling around the tip of Manhattan Island and across to Brooklyn, where the aircraft was transferred onto the pier.

A massive temporary building was then built around the Concorde to allow the crew to work through the monthslong process. Torraca said he worked closely with the Navy yard team the whole time, riding his bicycle from the Intrepid Museum back and forth to Brooklyn twice a week to check on the progress.

“It’s the fastest way to do it,” he said with a laugh.

As soon as the fresh and shiny Concorde had arrived back on board and was attracting a new wave of visitors, the team turned to a new project—an FG-1D Corsair arriving on loan from the Navy History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C.

Plans were to restore the aircraft for display and repaint it with the markings of 22-year-old Alfred Lerch, who flew in Intrepid’s VF-10 Squadron, becoming an “ace in a day” and receiving the Navy Cross for shooting down seven Japanese aircraft on his first combat mission in the Battle of Okinawa during WWII.

“I was so starstruck, basically, by having this jewel in my workshop,” said Torraca.

But the monthslong project turned out to be an involved process, requiring ingenuity from start to finish.

Initial inspection revealed that much of the interior mechanism required to fold the wings was not present. So began the quest of reaching out to various Corsair experts across the country and around the world to try to obtain these components.

The biggest challenge, however, turned out to be after the restoration was completed—getting the aircraft from the workshop on the flight deck to its new display location on the hangar deck below.

“Back in 1944, when it was a working aircraft carrier, there was plenty of ceiling clearance required to bring a Corsair in with the wings folded,” Torraca said. “However, now that it has changed life to a museum, there’s so much stuff attached to the ceiling of the hangar deck that we no longer have clearance required to fold the wings. So, it was decided to bring the Corsair without the outer wing panels attached, bring it to its final display position on the hangar deck, and then very carefully hoist each wing panel up into that position and do the [attachment].”

Before that could even happen, the aircraft had to be moved by aircraft elevator from the restoration hangar on the flight deck down to the hangar deck below. A task normally easy in wartime now became tricky, as the original elevator door had been modified for museum needs down to a 14-foot opening, with the narrowest point of the Corsair center section being 17 feet.

Torraca reached a solution by building a scale model of the elevator and aircraft to plot with the entire team, conniving a juggling game involving the aircraft on wheel skates, a lot of moving blankets, and tense holding of breath.

Success was sweet. Today the aircraft sits in a striking display surrounded by informational exhibits for groups of tourists and schoolchildren to admire and learn from.

Work for the Future

Interacting with the kids and tourists from around the world is one of Torraca’s favorite parts of the job, as it represents a chance to share his love for aviation every minute of the day.

Holding a private pilot certificate himself and owner of a 1950 Cessna 170, he has been working at the Intrepid Museum since 2011—and was volunteering before that. Over the years he has soaked up all the knowledge he could from his mentors and is doing his best to pass it on. Yet he is still learning from visitors who have personal experience with many of the aircraft on display.

“In good weather when I have the hangar door open and I’m chatting with visitors, I see such an international cross section,” he said. “I need a [language] translator, a lot of times, or they have one, maybe a younger relative. It’s just really heartwarming, being able to share these experiences with people.”

Some of the many programs the museum provides for kids are sometimes held in the shop itself, with the riveting activities being the most popular.

“The kids love it,” Torraca said. “We’ll make a little sheet metal silhouette of a Blue Angel jet or something, just be two parts, and say, ‘OK, you got to rivet the wing on… with two rivets.’ And they just love it. They take these things home, and we stencil…their names on it.”

It’s not just the youths who enjoy interacting with the aircraft.

The museum hosts programs for team-building exercises where corporations can bring their employees to escape from the office, washing aircraft outside on the flight deck to provide protection from accumulating salt that would cause damage. These frequent wash parties go a long way in aiding the aircraft’s longevity, helping with a task the museum staff simply doesn’t have the time for.

The intensive and never-ending line of work is just as much about interacting with the public as it is technical upkeep of the museum pieces.

“We’re taking care of anything aircraft related on the whole complex, but it’s sort of our responsibility to be ambassadors for the museum,” Torraca said. “So, if we’re in the shop working and someone has a question or someone wants to discuss something, it’s sort of expected for us to drop what we’re doing and go chat them up. Superiors understand that this is not a deadline-driven job.”

The Intrepid Museum team’s investment in detailed care of its displays ensures these aircraft— along with the history and technology they represent—will still be present and teaching new generations many years from now.

“The last 15 years have been the best years of my life because I’m here,” said Torraca. The MiG-17 currently in the shop is receiving a final coat of paint, after which the museum’s F-4 Phantom will take its place. It has serious corrosion issues and is expected to be a yearlong project, but the team is looking forward to it.

This is what it does.