We recently finished work with the State Historical Society’s Museum Collections Committee in Bismarck to consider and okay this long-term loan from the U.S. Luckily, no one else was on site that day to see me running up and down the hallway cheering-except maybe the security officers monitoring the cameras back at the ND Heritage Center & State Museum in Bismarck, but they’re cool.Īn HH-1H helicopter participates in a security exercise at Grand Forks in the early 1990s. Out of the blue (no pun intended), I received a phone call in September 2021 from the museum offering us not only an HH-1H Huey helicopter, but one that was used in the Grand Forks field.
But hey, maybe the Air Force would give us a flying one! Like the UH-1F, it looks a little different from the -H model. Then again, purists would note that the UH-1N did not serve in the Grand Forks field. Another option was to bide our time until Minot’s Bell UH-1N Twin Huey force retired in the mid-2020s. Army, which had operated many UH-1 helicopters over the years and probably had some on a storage lot somewhere waiting either for a museum or the scrapyard.
We considered other options like contacting the U.S. None were available, so once more we waited. Once I took over as site supervisor in 2017, I reconnected with the Air Force museum and submitted a little wish list for our collection-a helicopter, a missile, and/or a missile warhead-you know, nothing too outlandish. (For instance, painting an aircraft in polka dots would be frowned upon.) After receiving this certification, we had to wait. Certain standards had to be met to ensure we could properly display and maintain a piece of Air Force history. Thanks to our first Site Supervisor Mark Sundlov, we had been cleared to take artifact loans from the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. After all, just up the road in a park in McVille, North Dakota, there’s a former Army National Guard Huey. It didn’t seem to me like they were that rare. The Huey type also served the Grand Forks missile field in two variants, the smaller Bell UH-1F Iroquois from the 1960s and the bigger Bell HH-1H Iroquois that arrived in the early 1980s.Īlthough these were the same helicopter in name, they looked different, and the -H model was much more prevalent. Helicopters were used sparingly in the missile field as road transport was much cheaper.ĭuring my search for a chopper, I quickly narrowed it down to the Huey helicopter type made famous during the Vietnam War. Two views of the Oscar-Zero helipad, with the Missile Alert Facility in the distance, left.
Indeed, helicopters remain a key component for security in the active Minuteman missile fields around Minot. And it could also bring a contingent of armed security forces quickly to any missile site. It could perform search and rescue operations. While a lot-and I mean a lot-of driving was performed to and from the 15 Launch Control Facility sites in the Grand Forks missile field (a geographical area equivalent in size to New Jersey), a helicopter offered critical benefits. The helicopter mission was an important part of a missile field’s operations during the Cold War. A month prior to starting the job I’d been a groundskeeper in Nebraska. I nodded, wondering how that would even be possible. “Oh, and try to get a helicopter,” she added almost offhandedly. As I settled into my role as the site supervisor for the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site in fall 2017, my site manager provided an orientation and demonstrated the necessities of maintaining our “Little Missile House on the Prairie,” the former Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility.
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