By Kevin Ostrowski
TOWN OF TONAWANDA — The Navy jet that has stood at Kenney Field since 1959 has spent the past few months under wraps. When the wrap comes off, the town hopes residents will see the plane the way it looked when it arrived, and the crew restoring it found a surprise underneath the old paint: bullet holes.
Town Supervisor John Flynn has set Veterans Day, this Wednesday, as the goal for finishing the Grumman F9F-6P Cougar, a Korean War-era reconnaissance jet that sits in the town’s Veterans Park at Brighton Road and Colvin Boulevard. But he told WBEN last week that he would rather wait than unveil a half-finished site.
What the crew found
The work is being done by Gabe’s Collision Service. Owner Jeff Mucciarelli told WBEN that once his team stripped the jet, they found small patches across the fuselage and started pulling them off.
“That sort of sent chills down all of our spines,” Mucciarelli said.
“Once we got it down to the shell, there was these small patches all over the plane, and we’re like, oh, that’s odd,” he said. “So we started taking off these patches, and they were bullet holes. And even though it was a recon plane, total reconnaissance plane, we noticed where the cameras were and the swivel for the cameras on the nose of the plane, I mean, they still got shot at, and it was unbelievable to us when we started taking this apart and seeing this stuff.”
Rather than cover the damage again, the shop rebuilt it. “We fabricated metal, fabricated aluminum, riveted back on there, and we used some minor filler to smooth everything out,” Mucciarelli said. “But it’s the original shell now, rather than just a bunch of filler covering this plane. It really looks like an airplane now again, and we’re so happy to see that.”
The public record does not say where or when this particular jet took fire, and Mucciarelli did not say. The F9F-6P was the photo-reconnaissance version of the Cougar, built with cameras in the nose instead of guns, and Navy and Marine squadrons flew it through the mid-1950s.
A plane residents grew up on
The jet arrived in 1959, according to the town’s Veterans Memorial page, which says it is on loan from the National Naval Aviation Museum. For decades, children climbed on it. 7 News WKBW reported in July that the plane was fenced off in 2010 after the museum’s ownership prompted efforts to better protect it. The memorial around it took about eight weeks to build and was finished in 2009, the town says.
Mucciarelli was one of those children. “Because of the history of the plane, the history of this park, the fact that as a child I used to play on this plane, I just could not have the heart to see this go away,” he told WKBW when work began in July. “I’m going to do my part to make sure that it stays here for an awful long time.”
Flynn, a Navy veteran, said the project is personal. “The Navy was and is to this day a huge part of my life,” he told WKBW. “To have this plane here, a symbol of the Navy, actually here in the Town of Tonawanda that is so iconic to the residents of Tonawanda just gives me a great feeling of pride.”
He also told WBEN in July that the goal was to take the jet back to its 1959 look. “We’re going to re-do the whole plane, refurbish it, and make it what it was back when we got it back in 1959,” Flynn said. That would be a change. A 2008 photo of the jet on Wikimedia Commons, used at the top of this story, carries the photographer’s note that its colors and markings at the time did not represent any historic Navy aircraft.
Why Wednesday might slip
The plane is only part of the job. Flynn said crews had to tear up the area around it, and he wants the fence and landscaping finished before anyone holds a celebration.
“The plane may be painted by then and ready to go by then. But we had to disturb the whole area around the plane,” Flynn told WBEN. “We had to fix the fence there and fix the landscaping around it and make it what it looked like, so I don’t want to have like a coming out party until the whole area is redone there and looking nice.”
If the site is not ready Wednesday, Flynn said he would like to reveal the finished project by the end of next week, WBEN reported.
He described the jet as the anchor of the park. “Our Veterans Park honors all service members for all the branches of the military, and so it just complements not only the people of Tonawanda and Kenmore and Western New York who have served in the military, but it complements the community as a whole by having that plane there and having him be such a landmark figure to the entire community,” Flynn said.
What we still want to know
The restoration is part of the town’s observance of the nation’s 250th anniversary, WBEN reported in July. Neither station reported what the work costs or who is paying for it. The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the town and will update this story with the answers, along with the date of any public unveiling.
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