Jeff Duford, a curator at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, will present about the restoration of famed Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Memphis Belle on Thursday, April 18, at 7 p.m. as part of the EAA Aviation Museum Aviation Adventure Speaker Series.
Since he was a child, Jeff was always fascinated by aviation and dreamed of working at a museum like that of the National Museum of the USAF. When he had the opportunity to actually work at the museum he grew up visiting, he jumped at the chance.
“I was always crazy about airplanes and had a bunch of models and all that kind of stuff,” Jeff said. “I started reading about airplanes when I was able to read. I’m from the Detroit area originally and my dad brought me down to this museum when I was about 8 years old. I went back every couple years — it was always like Christmas. It’s just an amazing museum. I always wanted to work here. I went to school and studied history and as I was finishing my master’s degree, I realized it was very unlikely that I’d get a full-time job in a museum, so I looked at joining the Air Force. While I was in the application process, there was an internship that opened here and I got it, fortunately, and that was 21 years ago.”
For a large portion of Jeff’s tenure as a curator, he’s been involved with the restoration of Memphis Belle. After the museum took possession of the historic World War II bomber from the Memphis Belle Memorial Association in October 2005, Jeff and the rest of the restoration team spent 13 years working on getting it ready for display, which finally happened in May 2018.
“I was involved [with the restoration] from the beginning. I actually started working on it before it came here,” he said. “I’ve been involved in all the different aspects of the restoration, including configuration and markings. I curated the exhibit that’s on display. The exhibit is more than 500 linear feet in length, it’s a huge exhibit with about 25 exhibit cases. I worked with the families to secure donations of artifacts and archival material. I didn’t lead the team for the [unveiling] event, but worked with the event staff and some of the events and things that we did. I’ve kind of lived with the airplane for a long time.”
Over the course of 13 years, about 55,000 man-hours went into the airplane’s restoration. While any restoration is challenging, Jeff explained that Memphis Belle’s was particularly difficult because of the lack of paperwork in the U.S. Army Air Force at the time it served during World War II.
“What was most challenging was that the Belle was flying its combat missions at a unique time in the strategic bombing campaign, particularly in regards to the configuration of the aircraft,” Jeff said. “When the Belle was flying in combat, there was no formal modification program in the 8th Air Force. As a result, there’s very little documentation. There were changes that were made to the airplane, and it’s ironic because literally the month that they finished their combat missions, the 8th Air Force formalized their modification program and we begin to see a lot of documentation in assigning codes to various modifications and things like that.”
Jeff said he went through 50,000 pages of documents from the 8th Air Force Service Command but was only able to find a letter giving approval for the modifications.
“But what was an incredible gift conversely with that problem that we have was there are more than 11 and a half hours of color footage that William Wyler and his team shot to make the 1944 movie and that footage still exists, it’s in the national archives,” he said. “That was a huge help for us.”
Looking back on the restoration, Jeff feels very fortunate to have been involved with the process despite the fact that it was an intensive and pressure-packed project.
“It was definitely rewarding,” he said. “I’m so grateful to have had anything to do with it. There were so many things that had to be done, I rarely saw the big picture. I think that’s probably the experience that I had. It’s an endless series of questions that had to be answered. Hanging over my head and others was the fact that this was a national treasure and it’s especially important that whatever we do be correct and respectful. We generally are that way anyway because of what we’re working with. But this was different. I’m not the only one that experienced that, especially the guys in restoration. Our restoration staff, the craftsmen are amazing. Just about everybody in the museum had something to do with it.”