Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum could be closed for months

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This article was published 09/11/2022 (1096 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It may be months before the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum can reopen, even partially, its executive director says after engineers discovered potentially dangerous damage to the facility’s structure.

Hangar No. 1 at the Brandon Municipal Airport, which houses vintage aircraft and other exhibits, was suddenly closed last week after damage to a pair of trusses that support the roof was found, which put the roof at risk of collapse.

“That’s why we have to be closed,” executive director Stephen Hayter said Tuesday. “We certainly wouldn’t want to be putting public, or volunteers, or staff at risk in the hangar.”

As a result, a Remembrance Day open house at the museum has been cancelled.

However, the Royal Canadian Air Force Second World War memorial, located outside the hangar, remains open to the public, and a Day of Remembrance lecture that was scheduled to be held in the museum’s canteen on Saturday will go ahead.

Otherwise, the museum remains closed.

Within the hangar, the museum — a Manitoba Signature Museum, Manitoba Star Attraction and National Historic Site — features Second World War aircraft, vehicles and artifacts, but Hayter said the hangar itself is the museum’s biggest, and “incredibly important,” artifact.

One of the museum’s original buildings, the double hangar was built in 1940 and used to store and maintain Cessna Crane aircraft used by the No. 12 Service Flight Training School.

Now, it serves as the museum building itself and contains a chapel, gift shop, display areas for the vintage aircraft and vehicles, and a workshop where planes are restored.

Engineers are working on a plan for a temporary fix, Hayter said, adding they’ll also develop a plan to permanently fix the building but the cost of those repairs will require fundraising.

Time is a factor.

“The scary thing is, we want to get it structurally safe with a temporary fix before we have any heavy snowfall,” Hayter said. “That’s the biggest concern. You know, we don’t want weight on this building without it being shored up.”

The structural problem with the building was found while Burns Maendel Consulting Engineers Ltd. was studying a hangar door truss. Museum officials believed it was a good time to have the whole building checked, and that’s why the problem was found.

In 1985, Hayter explained, the City of Brandon installed an exterior metal truss on the building to reinforce the heavy hangar doors, which have been repeatedly raised over the years as the doors have settled. However, Hayter continued, the exterior truss put strain on other trusses in the building and damaged them.

Now, the exterior truss that was added in the ’80s needs to be removed, the proper door truss itself needs to be fixed, and then the remaining damaged trusses in the building need to be repaired.

The hangar was fixed in 2000, Hayter said, when trusses were repaired and some reinforced. An old-fashioned tar and gravel roof was removed, relieving some of the weight. But the door truss, which ultimately led to the current problems, couldn’t be fixed at the time.

“We didn’t see any of this issue, visually,” he said. “But, of course, you need an engineer to tell you specifically what’s going on, and so that’s what they’re doing now.”

At this point, there’s no figure for how much repairs will cost, Hayter said, adding other repair work also needs to be done sooner rather than later, so the museum is going to have to go into “fundraising mode.”

Meanwhile, some vintage aircraft that were displayed in the hangar have been placed outside, and temporary homes must be found for more fragile aircraft.

It appears the structural problem may be confined to one side of the hangar, Hayter added. Once that section is stabilized, it may be possible to use the other half to house the air-worthy vintage planes, with the shuffling of other exhibits.

At that point, it may be possible to partially reopen the museum to the public, but he said that could be months away.

» ihitchen@brandonsun.com