If a retired aircraft could sigh with content then hurrying customers of the Canberra Airport may hear sighs coming from the Lockheed Hudson Mark IV Bomber installed there on Thursday.
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While a warplane may be a little chilling and anomalous at a civilian airport in peaceful times the Hudson turns out to have a thorough airliner pedigree. No wonder then, a bit portly and amiable-looking for a weapon of death, it even looks like an airliner.
As his team put the finishings touches to Thursday's reassembly and installation the Australian War Memorial's Jamie Croker (he is a conservator of large technology objects) explained the Hudson's pedigree and looks.
"This Hudson was one of 240 built at Burbank in California, brought over by boat [during WWII] and then finally assembled in Australia. This one arrived in December 1941. The whole aircraft design is based on an airliner. Lockheed adapted an existing airliner design to fit the wartime military contract. So that's why it's got all those windows."
And what's more, Croker explains, in a varied post-war career (and after being active in the war as a bomber) the Hudson served as an airliner in the fleet of East West Airlines. A major part of its restoration since the memorial obtained it in 2001 has been the conversion of its interior away from passenger-carrying plushness and back to the bare, steely, functional military plainness known to its wartime five-man crews.
The Hudson's freshly-painted exterior, Croker says, exactly duplicates one of the two standard camouflage patterns the Hudsons wore in wartime.
Canberra Airport managing director Stephen Byron was there on Thursday, looking on as Croker and two memorial colleagues completed the reassembly "jigsaw" by adding the last pieces of the puzzle, the plane's wings' trailing edge flaps.
"We've always wanted to collaborate with the national institutions and we knew we'd have space here and the War Memorial was such an obvious party to do this with," Byron reflected as Croker's screwdriver whirred.
"Obviously an aircraft is appropriate, given that we are an airport. But there's also the fact of Australian military history and of Canberra having one of the finest war museums in the world. So [the aircraft being here in the terminal] will remind the people that come and go here just for business, in their suits, in a hurry, of what else there is in Canberra."
