Mississippi Queen at home in Madison
For this holiday season, the Mississippi Wing of the Commemorative Air Force has a special wish for Christmas: to help a local treasure take flight.
The Air Force’s wish is to restore its vintage World War II era PT-19 aircraft, Mississippi Queen, to flying condition as part of their “12 Planes of Christmas” campaign. The campaign helps make sure the selected planes are airworthy, which helps not only the organization raise money through flights and tours, but it also honors and preserves the legacy of the brave heroes that flew these iconic planes.
The story of the Mississippi Queen is about the training that World War II pilots received in the skies of Mississippi to prepare for combat. Built in 1942, the plane was a training craft used at two different military fields in Columbus and Laurel. One of those fields, Bruce Campbell Field, where the Mississippi Wing of the Commemorative Air Force is located, was also a military aviation-training field for pilots, where pilots learned to fly on PT-19s before moving to more advanced aircrafts.
According to the Air Force, restoring the Mississippi Queen will allow the Air Force to educate the public about an important part of Mississippi’s place in the nation’s military aviation history.
Jack Welch, Wing Leader of the Mississippi Wing of the Commemorative Air Force and member of the CAF for seven years, said this will be a great chance to show the public how it was to fly in a plane from the World War II era. Being interested in aviation and a history major in college, Welch said this was right up his alley.
“We’re a living, flying museum,” Welch said. “We want to have this plane flying. Here on the home front during the war, there was a lot of pilot training going on right here in Madison and other parts of Mississippi that a lot of people were not aware of.”
Welch added that showing off this antique plane to the public would also help people get interested in aviation and learning the history of it.
For the last 20 years, the Mississippi Queen has been hangared in Texas, but it has returned home to Mississippi, where it received its “Mississippi Queen” title.
“The plane had four owners, the most recent being the late Bob Dunn. We located it in Nacogdoches, Texas,” Welch said. “We got the plane on May 20 of this year. It’s a simple training plane, one of the first couple of aircrafts a pilot would use to learn how to fly other planes. Although training was done here in Madison, the plane itself was not stored here. It was 1943 before it came to Mississippi.”
The Mississippi Queen is designed specifically to be a training plane, having a place for the student to sit up front and the instructor to sit in the back. It’s a very forgiving plane, since it has oversized struts to allow for much harder landings.
As of right now, the current status of the Mississippi Queen, according to the Air Force, is that needed repairs must be done to a damaged spot on the wing with paint and a protective coating, along with fabric work. A radio, intercom, and other electronics must be installed as well to allow to plane to play with a passenger.
The expected completion date of the plane’s restoration is April 1 of 2021.
For more information about the Mississippi Wing or the PT-19 Mississippi Queen, contact Jack Welch at 601-209-0025, or email jack.welchiii@gmail.com.
To donate for the restoration of the Mississippi Queen, visit www.SupportCAF.org and click the “contribute” button to the Mississippi Queen under the “campaigns” section.