Aircraft at Grumman Memorial Park get a facelift

Volunteers climbed onto the F-14 and A-6 aircraft at Grumman Memorial Park Friday morning and started power-washing, scraping and scrubbing.

“We’re helping restore the planes today, and we’ll talk to the town about what to do long-term,” said Andrew Parton, executive director of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City. He and curator Joshua Stoff oversaw several volunteers as they began a thorough cleaning of the planes, scraping loose paint on spots to be filled and repainted.

Parton said bird droppings are particularly corrosive to the paint on the aircraft, which have been displayed at the site of the former Grumman Aerospace Flight Test Facility, now EPCAL, in Calverton since the late 1990s.

The job was more involved than it looked, Councilwoman Jodi Giglio said.

“The paint needed to be specified by the federal government; it needs to match the serial number of the original paint,” she said.

The town supplied the paint, power washers, bucket truck, ladders and other materials needed for the work.

Giglio and the rest of the town board showed up to thank the workers for their effort.

Supervisor Sean Walter said the town lacks the expertise necessary for the restoration. He said that when he took office, he learned that the aircraft, which are on loan to the town from the U.S. Navy’s National Museum of Naval Aviation, were not being maintained. Walter said he met Parton at a meeting of the Long Island Regional Planning Council, of which Walter is a member. The two discussed what could be done and the refurbishment was set up.

The F-14 Tomcat was a formidable fighter in the Navy’s arsenal between 1974 and 2006. Seventy-nine were sold to the Imperial Iranian Air Force in 1976, and those that were operational in 1980 may have been an influential and feared instrument in the country’s defense against the Iraqi invasion of that year, according to historians. LINK: http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/persiancats.html

The A-6 was a precision bomber so sophisticated that the U.S. military didn’t share its technology with any of its allies.

Walter said the aircraft, one of the town’s most recognizable landmarks, represent an important part of Riverhead’s history and maybe its future.

“This is the heritage of Grumman and we don’t want to lose this. When we go to rebuild and we’re doing the commercial subdivision, there would be nothing that would make me happier than to try to bring in a company that was doing some sort of aviation, whether it be small-scale avionics or something as large as Grumman,” Walter said.

“We landed on the moon from here, we fought wars from here, and it would just be wonderful to get something like this back to the town…but if not, this is a true testament and memorial to everybody that served and everybody that worked here.”

RiverheadLOCAL photos by Micah Danney