By admin 
More than 35 aircraft — from fighter jets to commercial airliners — reside at the Aerospace Museum of California’s outdoor airpark, just a stone’s throw from Sacramento’s McClellan Airport.
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Thousands of people visit the museum every year, admiring the airplanes parked in the sun. As one might expect, the aircraft get pretty dirty from the daily exposure to visitors and weather.
That’s where volunteers step in. Dozens of volunteers show up every year to help maintain the park’s aircraft.
On Thursday, one such group of volunteers was doing just that. Around 40 members of SAFE Credit Union’s employee resource group VALOR, which stands for veterans and loved ones resource, arrived to scrub the dirt from several planes including the museum’s camo-green Fairchild-Republic A-10A Thunderbolt II “Warthog,” its Douglas A-1E Skyraider and a Sikorsky CH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” military helicopter.
According to Tom Jones, CEO of the museum, the resource group has been helping care for the planes for about 2 years and they’ve developed a method to clean the planes using big wash totes.
“Those things hold about 300 gallons worth of water and two of them are fresh water, one of them soap,” he said, adding that the soap tote contains an entire canister of Tide. “When you hit that thing with a fire pump and a fire hose it just shoots soapy water all over the aircraft.”
Jones says the volunteers are divided into teams and given brushes — some of them attached to 25 foot poles — and they scrub the plane down.
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“They come up, scrub, scrub, scrub, and then scrub all the way around the plane, getting as high as they can,” he said “and the dirt just sheds right off the plane.”
According to Kimberly Ross, a project manager at SAFE Credit Union and one of the event’s organizers, the plane washing event was born out of SAFE Credit Union’s deep ties to both the museum and McClellan Air Force Base. While SAFE no longer has a location at McClellan, SAFE’s first Credit Union location was opened there in the 1940s.
“How many times do you get to say that you’ve washed a plane?” Ross said. “They have to get washed anyway, so why not have the opportunity to make it fun and invite the SAFE volunteers to come out and do it?”
For James Kline, a wealth advisor for SAFE Financial Services, cleaning the planes gave him an opportunity to give back to the community and preserve history. To him, getting under the planes and seeing their mechanics made the day memorable.
“Just seeing how big they are in person is pretty amazing,” he said.
According to Jones, this event marks the most planes they’ve been able to wash at once at 16 planes.
“You think about the visitor experience when somebody comes into the aerospace museum and they see clean planes instead of planes that are really filthy,” he said. “It just makes a great visitor experience for the public.”
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