Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum

Set on the grounds of today’s Columbus Municipal Airport, the Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum anchors a landscape once dominated by Atterbury Army Air Base and later Bakalar Air Force Base, a World War II and Cold War training hub for transport and bomber crews. The museum’s focus on aviation heritage is tightly bound to this local airfield history, tracing how C-46 and C-47 troop carrier operations, glider training, and later reserve airlift units used the runways just outside its doors. Inside, the emphasis falls on material culture and engineering rather than spectacle: a motorized cutaway of an R-3350 engine exposes the mechanics behind mid-century powerplants, while a CG-4A glider nose section and reproduction barracks interpret the human and logistical side of airborne training. The 1:4 Wright Flyer replica and large-scale aircraft models tie this regional story into a broader arc of flight development. Ongoing restoration work—culminating in the reassembled C-119 “Flying Boxcar” brought in from Wyoming—underscores the practical challenges of preserving large airframes in a Midwestern climate and offers a close study of transport aircraft design, structure, and service environments.