The Mary Baker Engen restoration hangar is finished - I believe there are very minor things left to do in the archive rooms, but I think that theoretically they can start moving everything from the Garber facility.
I was given a tour this morning, here's some highlights.
- There is already a restored He-219 fuselage + empennage and engine nacelles in the main gallery. The wings are still at Garber, being finished. The docent estimated that the two would be mated by the end of the year.
-The restoration bay is state-of-the-art and about 40,000 sq.ft. There are windows all around the top floor and visitors can see everything that's going on from there. The walkway connects with the space hangars, so as an additional bonus, now you can see a whole lot of space artifacts from a raised point of view.
-Enterprise will likely be replaced by another orbiter (announcement on the 12th). For this to happen, Enterprise has to go. NASA people have been cycling the landing gear and ascertaining that it can actually be lifted on the 747 that will whisk it away.
-There is now an Me-163 in preserved (non-restored conditions) on the gallery floor just outside the space hangar. For a while it had been sitting with the wings detached but now they are on.
I found out that the planes exposed in the Engen Hangar are NOT necessarily the ones that will be restored next. Since they have so much space, they are bringing in planes representative of the different states of preservation. I'm pretty sure the Dauntless is the next one on the list (it was a condition imposed by the Engen family who generously coughed up $15M. Daddy flew SB2C's in the pacific). So I'm not actually sure when the other planes in the hangar will be restored, but they are definitely going to be visible at least. The Ho-IX's wings where already there, but the fuselage is still at Garber while they are figuring out how to transport it without damaging the plywood.
The Lippisch glider is still in the same crates it was put in by NACA at the end of their wind tunnel tests back in post-WWII (I think it's the darker crates above the Kikka's empennage, I think). The Sikorsky JRS-1 is the only surviving aircraft that was operational at Pearl Harbor on December 7th. For the Kikka, they are still trying to figure out what airframe/hybrid they have, as they suspect it was assembled with part from different prototypes. They do know it doesn't have the damage associated with the one that ended up in Tokyo bay.
Sorry about the image quality! I took these with my cell phone behind glass panes.