East Alton Site Proposed for Local Aviation Museum
EAST ALTON — A volunteer with a nonprofit aviation museum is hoping it might find a new home at the St. Louis Regional Airport in East Alton.
Jack Beetz told the airport board Thursday night that The Greater Saint Louis Air and Space Museum is currently housed in Curtiss Wright Hangar No. 2 at the St. Louis Downtown Airport.
“It’s hidden in Cahokia,” said Beetz, a retired Air Force pilot who also was a McDonnell Douglas engineer and 23-year employee of Delta Airlines. “It’s at the back end, by old hangars. There’s not as much interest there.”
Beetz volunteers as a docent at the museum, which is 100% operated by volunteers, now open 18 hours a week, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Moving the museum to East Alton, he said, would require approval from its board of directors.
Beetz said he is particularly interested in developing the museum as a destination for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs, noting that he taught classes at Boeing on how to work with composites. Last summer, Beetz and Air Force veteran Joe Steimann repaired and repainted the F-4 Phantom fighter jet at the St. Louis Regional Airport in East Alton.
“STEM is big in the area; it’s very popular now,” Beetz told the board. “And this is an active airport with a restaurant.”
If the airport could not initially support a separate museum, Beetz said, it could start, perhaps, as a satellite location of the Cahokia museum.
“I appreciate his vision of what could be here,” said St. Louis Regional Airport’s Dave Miller, director of aviation. “We have a lot of land, but not a lot of empty buildings. I like the idea of it being a satellite with what’s already there, because they already have all the responsibility of the museum.”
The Saint Louis Air and Space Museum was incorporated in July 1982. Originally the museum was located at Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield, Missouri but, in 1993, moved to Cahokia because of historic flooding that year at the Spirit of St. Louis.
Reach Jill Moon at 618-208-6448 and Twitter @jill_moon.
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