The first plane to carry the name “Air Force One” took to the sky again this week, flying from Arizona to Virginia, where it will undergo renovations.
Sporting the nickname “Columbine II,” the Lockheed C121A Constellation, built in 1948, had been collecting rust at an airport in Arizona.
The four-engine plane will be restored by Dynamic Aviation Group at a facility in Bridgewater, where it landed Wednesday, WVIR-TV reported. The company will work on recreating the interior to look like it did when President Dwight Eisenhower used Columbine II to fly around the world.
The plane nearly collided with another aircraft over New York City in 1953, when air traffic controllers confused flight numbers of Eastern Airlines flight 8610 and the president’s plane, which at the time was called Air Force 8610. The name Air Force One was devised to avoid any future confusion, but did not become official until 1962, according to the White House Museum. Now any Air Force aircraft carrying a sitting president is automatically labeled Air Force One. Likewise, any Army aircraft that takes the president for a ride is called Army One, and for a Marine Corps plane Marine One. If the president rides a civil aircraft, then it is called Executive One.
“We want to see it used as a teaching aid for young people to understand that era of American history, which was a very, very good era of American history,” Dynamic Aviation founder Karl Stoltzfus told WVIR-TV.
Dynamic Aviation says it expects the Air Force One restoration project to take years.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that any aircraft carrying a sitting president gets the call sign Air Force One.
