Fifteen years after Congress closed the Brunswick Naval Air Station, the nonprofit museum that sprung up in its wake is ramping up for a reunion of ex-base personnel.
The Brunswick Naval Air Station Museum announced it will hold an alumni get-together September 18-19.
“We are hard at work planning,” museum officials said on their Facebook page. “Come celebrate at this two-day event, visit with friends and fellow service members and share the memories.”
The air base was in operation for some 70 years before it was closed as part of the nation’s base-realignment process.
Now known as Brunswick Landing, the former base is home to homes, businesses, the Brunswick Executive Airport and the museum.
The museum maintains as exhibits a restored P-2 Neptune and a P-3 Orion, both anti-submarine planes that patrolled the Atlantic Ocean during the Cold War era.
The museum last summer unveiled a refurbished P-2 that has been displayed at the old air station for more than 50 years since it retired from service.
The P-3 was the forerunner of the P-8 Poseidon, a more modern aircraft that the Navy now uses to hunt for enemy subs.
The usually stealthy P-8 showed up in the headlines last week, flying a “combat air patrol” for President Trump while he was attending the College Football Playoff National Championship at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.
The aircraft provided “incident awareness assessment support” for the U.S. Secret Service during the president’s appearance.
The P-8s that replaced the iconic P-3s which used to fly out of Brunswick have what Navy officials call “a smoother flight experience, subjecting crews to less turbulence and fumes, allowing them to concentrate better on missions.”
Robert Ryan of Durham, a former aviation electronics technician based in Brunswick, described five years ago the challenges of flying in the P-3s.
“Most of our mission was flying less than 2,000 feet over water, so the ride was always bumpy,” Ryan recalled. “It always smelled like a mix of JP-5 jet fuel, gun smoke and cigarette smoke. Some guys couldn’t do it.”
