MoF Also Celebrates Opening of New Airpark Pavilion to Display Planes

EPHRATA, WA April 5, 2016  Bill the Buff Man heads to Seattle as a 4th year member of the largest and most technologically advanced Air Force One Detailing Team in over ten years. This year, in celebration of Boeing 100th Anniversary, and the opening of the Seattle Museum of Flight’s new Airpark Pavilion, the Buff Man will participate in the biggest and most prestigious historic aircraft detailing project on record. The 2-week long mega-detailing event starts Sunday, April 10 and runs through Saturday, April 23 and includes the team’s continued preservation of the original Air Force One presidential jet; polishing the all-aluminum fuselage of a legendary WWII Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber; and cleaning and preserving the paint and bright work on 14 additional priceless Boeing aircraft. The new Airpark Pavilion now houses on display, over 15 icons of American aviation history.

Chosen by Master detailer, trainer, and mentor, Renny Doyle of Attention to Details & Detailing Success, the Buff Man is no stranger to cleaning, restoring, and protecting multi-million dollar museum treasures and rare, exotic, and classic vehicles of all kinds, but Boeing’s Centennial Celebration is the Air Force One Detailing Team’s most demanding detailing project yet.

“Our annual team is about 30 members but this year it will require about twice that,” says Quinn. “The team will come in two, weeklong shifts — Team Alpha and Team Bravo — with Team Centennial, which consists of team leaders, supervisors, and veterans of the project, including myself, will be onsite for the full run. “This is by far the most exciting and yet the most challenging project the Museum of Flight has offered us and we are all honored to be tasked with such a prestigious and unprecedented opportunity. We will also be onsite with the Buff Man mobile unit providing storage for equipment, and electrical power to the project.”

All AFO Team members own their own successful detailing businesses, and they pay their own expenses and donate their time and skill to the massive project.

Air Force One

Fourteen years ago, Doyle received a call from a Bush Administration official asking him about restoring the Boeing 707-120 also known as Special Air Missions (SAM) 970, the first Air Force One jet, which was a flying Oval Office for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. It also entertained many international VIPs such as Nikita Khrushchev and Henry Kissinger.

Shocked by the call, Doyle thought at first it was a prank until he saw the neglected jet, morosely displayed on out on the open tarmac, exposed to Seattle’s notorious climate. It had not been cleaned in many years and he knew it would take several years to bring it back to as close to its natural glory as possible.

In the past two years, the AFO Team has entered into a “preservation” rather than restoration stage with the plane. Just this year, with the opening of the museum’s new covered hangar, AFO has found a protective home, but it still requires an annual cleaning and polishing and is officially the Air Force One Detailing Team’s responsibility to maintain it at a high level.

WWII B-29 Superfortress Bomber

Also known as T-Square 54, this WWII workhorse is scarred with holes where fifty-caliber bullets raked her aluminum skin flying sorties over the Pacific and Japan before being abandoned for many years in an Arizona desert. When the Museum of Flight saved her and brought her to Seattle, the 2011 Air Force One Detailing Team polished her bright work for the first time since the 1940s.

“After five years, she isn’t in nearly as bad shape as she was when we first cleaned her up,” says Quinn. “But that raw aluminum gets chalky with time and we will have to use a heavy metal polish to bring back that perfectly mirrored surface in all her original glory.”

For more information about this year’s Boeing Centennial mega-detailing event at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, contact Bill the Buff Man Quinn at (509) 398-1284, or Kimberly Ballard at (256) 653-4003.