Museum plans ‘major redevelopment’
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Brandon’s warplane museum is planning a roughly $15-million “major redevelopment” project to stabilize the hangar and potentially build a new half-hangar on site.
The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum issued a negotiated request for proposals in February and is receiving regular on-site visits from interested parties, director Zoe McQuinn told the Sun on Friday.
The museum’s leadership is searching for the best way to fix the hangar’s morphing concrete floor, which is affecting the historic wooden structure on top of it.
Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum director general Zoe McQuinn poses in front of a 1943-built Boeing Stearman Kaydet, a recent addition to the historic hangar. The museum has issued a request for proposals for a huge project in the hopes of restoring and renovating the historic hangar and building an additional modern hangar for year-round exhibit restoration work. (Photos by Matt Goerzen/The Brandon Sun)
“You can see (the effects) all throughout the hangar in different ways,” McQuinn said Friday, while stepping over cracks. “We need a way to stop the heaving in the floor and the twisting in the frame.”
The issue has impacted hangar doors that now fail to open and close properly, as well as floor space, because the museum had to erect temporary support beams.
The specific details of the redevelopment are not yet known, but the goal is to keep as much as possible of the roughly 80-year-old wooden hangar while stabilizing it, McQuinn said.
The museum plans to install heating infrastructure in the hangar as well, preventing freeze-thaw cycles that have contributed to the cracking concrete floor, she said.
The entire redevelopment project is hopefully going to be finished in the next five years, she added.
The potential new hangar would be used for restoration work on historic planes. Its exterior would be styled to reflect a Second World War-era aesthetic.
The desired location is to the south of the existing hangar near the Brandon Municipal Airport. McQuinn said the location may change as the process moves forward.
The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum will be looking to all levels of government for support in fundraising for the project, and is also taking donations from the public. McQuinn said the museum would not yet discuss how much money it had secured for the project.
The museum announced in January that it had received $1.6 million from a late Westman resident, a lifetime museum member, who passed away in Treherne in 2024 and left the money in his will. McQuinn said at the time that generous sum was a step toward keeping the museum around at least another 50 years.
Functionality is currently impaired in some areas of the hangar, McQuinn said on Friday.
Visible heavy cracks in the cement floor follow the north wall of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum hangar at the Brandon Municipal Airport, and thick metal poles installed in 2023 act as structural supports for the roof, which is susceptible to strain under heavy snow.
Temporary support beams installed in 2023 to stabilize the hangar have crowded the interior space so much that planes are difficult to move around on the east side, she said. A dozen of the beams stand in front of the east-side hangar doors, propped up by wood blocks.
“We’ve lost functionality,” McQuinn said.
“It should be a large open area.”
The museum is hoping to stay operational through the redevelopment. The work will require sensitive caretaking of the collection of warplanes currently stored in the hangar, she said.
The bidding process for the negotiated request for proposal closes on April 13. The museum is planning to host an open house-style meeting to present possible designs to the public this summer, with the date forthcoming, McQuinn said.
The museum is set to reopen to the public next Wednesday.
» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com