An A-3 Skywarrior will greet visitors at the main gate of Whidbey Island Naval Air Station by the end of this month.
Crews shut down Ault Field Road early Saturday morning to move the jet to a spot just off base near the Langley Gate. During the next few weeks, workers plan to prepare the site to mount the jet on a static display.
Justin and Tiffany Schut rolled out of bed at 5 a.m. Saturday with their son Leland, 2, to stand in the rain and watch the jet make its slow journey down Ault Field Road.
“We’re a military family,” he said. “We’ve never seen it.”
The Skywarrior was in naval service from 1956-91 as a strategic bomber. It was the largest and heaviest jet to operate from Naval aircraft carriers and was nicknamed “the whale.”
The A-3 Skywarrior Whidbey Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit composed of local Skywarrior enthusiasts, worked years to acquire, restore and display an A-3.
“We waited six years to get to this point,” said Bill Burklow, one of the directors of the A-3 Skywarrior Whidbey Memorial Foundation.
There were many challenges along the way. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and negotiated an often frustrating bureaucratic process. The project was put on hold in 2012 when workers found an underground storage tank under the original site for the display.
The jet operated at NAS Whidbey from 1957-68. The foundation successfully argued this was a good home for one of the few remaining airworthy A-3s because of the large naval community that included many former A-3 pilots, engineers and mechanics.
The jet was the first aircraft Burklow worked on as an aviation electronics technician.
Burklow called it “my baby.”
“(I) had the opportunity to ride on one of these back in 1970. I was an air traffic controller on the Enterprise, and VAQ-130 was flying the A-3s,” said Rick Hargarten in a comment posted on the Whidbey Crosswind Facebook page. “They offered to take any controllers out on a tanker cycle that wanted to go.”
“What an E-ticket ride!” Hogarten said. “The catapult shot … the arrested landing which isn’t a landing at all … it’s a controlled crash. A fabulous memory involving a great airplane.
Many people put in thousands of volunteer hours to refurbish the plane, which had been sitting on the tarmac on base.
Two people in particular — Jim Croft and Jeff Hanson — put in so much time that they are honored with having their names on the plane.
