The city is working to acquire a U.S. Air Force B-58 Hustler aircraft to be displayed at the Fort Worth Aviation Museum at 3300 Ross Ave. by Meacham International Airport.
The city council passed a resolution that stated the city has enough funding to relocate the aircraft to Fort Worth from the former Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum in Rantoul, Illinois. The cost to relocate the airplane is about $250,000.
The plane is owned by the Air Force and used to be on display at the Chanute museum until the museum closed last year. The museum is in the process of disposing aircraft and was going to send the B-58 to Tucson, Arizona, to be “cut up and destroyed” until the Fort Worth Aviation Museum requested to have the plane relocated to Fort Worth, District 3 City Councilman Zim Zimmerman said.
Zimmerman said he expects the city and the Air Force to reach an agreement to bring the plane to Fort Worth within the next month. The plane will then undergo restoration before being displayed at the Fort Worth Aviation Museum.
The B-58 was a supersonic bomber aircraft used around the 1960s. The planes were built in Fort Worth, and Zimmerman said he hopes the people of Fort Worth will become more acquainted with North Texas aviation history.
“We are the city of cowboys and culture, but we would not be that if it hadn’t been for the military industrial complex here in the Fort Worth and North Texas area,” he said.