Brandon plane museum needs to land cash for major overhaul

BRANDON — Brandon’s warplane museum is planning a roughly $15-million “major redevelopment” to stabilize the hangar and potentially build a new half-hangar on site.

The Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum issued a negotiated request for proposals in February and is receiving regular on-site visits from interested parties, director Zoe McQuinn told the Brandon Sun on Friday.

Museum officials are searching for the best way to repair the hangar’s concrete floor, which is affecting the historic wooden structure on top of it.

“You can see (the effects) all throughout the hangar in different ways,” McQuinn said Friday, while stepping over cracks. “We need a way to stop the heaving in the floor and the twisting in the frame.”

The hangar doors fail to open and close properly, so the museum had to erect temporary support beams.

The specific details of the redevelopment are not yet known, but the goal is to keep as much as possible of the roughly 80-year-old wooden hangar while stabilizing it, McQuinn said.

The museum plans to install heating infrastructure in the hangar to prevent freeze-thaw cycles that have contributed to the cracking concrete floor, she said.

They expect the redevelopment will be finished in the next five years, she said.

The potential new hangar would be used to restore historic planes. Its exterior would be styled to reflect a Second World War-era aesthetic.

The desired location is to the south of the existing hangar near the Brandon Municipal Airport, north of the city off Highway 10. McQuinn said the location may change as the process moves forward.

The museum will ask all levels of government for financial support and is taking donations from the public.

McQuinn said the museum would not yet discuss how much money it had secured for the project.

The museum announced in January that it had received $1.6 million from a Westman resident, a lifetime museum member, who died in Treherne in 2024 and left the money in his will.

McQuinn said at the time that generous sum was a step toward keeping the museum around at least another 50 years.

Functionality is currently impaired in some areas of the hangar, McQuinn said on Friday.

Temporary support beams installed in 2023 to stabilize the hangar have crowded the interior space so much that it’s difficult to more around planes on the east side, she said.

Two dozen of the beams stand in front of the east-side hangar doors, propped up by wooden blocks.

“We’ve lost functionality,” McQuinn said. “It should be a large open area.”

The museum is hoping to remain operational through the redevelopment. The work will require sensitive caretaking of the collection of warplanes currently stored in the hangar, she said.

The bidding process for the negotiated request for proposal closes on April 13. The museum plans to host an open house to present possible designs to the public this summer.

— Brandon Sun