All in the Family: At the Heart of the Heritage Flight Museum

These days it is getting harder to find a family-owned FBO at airports. It’s even more difficult to locate a family-run aviation museum unless you head to Skagit Regional Airport (KBVS) in Burlington, Washington, home of the Heritage Flight Museum.

The museum was founded in 1996 by astronaut and retired Air Force Major General William “Bill” Anders and his wife, Valerie. 

Bill Anders is perhaps best remembered as the Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 8, who, with astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, orbited the moon in 1968.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

If you're not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today to get the issue as soon as it is released in either Print or Digital formats.

Subscribe Now

The mission launched on December 21, and on Christmas Eve, the Apollo crew did a special telecast from space, reading the first verses from the Book of Genesis. 

It was at this time that Anders took a photograph of Earth in the distance. This image became known as the “Earthrise” and has been used on numerous magazine covers and posters and is heralded as one of the most significant images of the 20th century.

The Anders Legacy

The Heritage Flight Museum (HFM) is dedicated to veterans. Anders is the son of a Navy officer and followed in his footsteps, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1955. That same year he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and began flight training in a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor. 

Anders wanted to be a test pilot, which required him to earn an advanced degree. The military directed him toward nuclear engineering. In 1963 he applied to NASA to be part of the Project Gemini and Apollo programs. Along the way he married and raised four sons and two daughters.

After leaving NASA in the 1970s, he worked in the government’s nuclear energy program and then the civilian aerospace industry before retiring to the Pacific Northwest. He continued to fly, picking up a few surplus military aircraft, such as the T-6, T-34, and P-51D, which he named Val-Halla in homage to his wife, Valerie. 

According to Lieutenant Colonel Greg Anders, son of the museum founders and now the senior vice president and executive director of the HFM, the idea for starting a gallery began when his parents realized the P-51 attracted a crowd wherever it went. 

• READ MORE: Tillamook Air Museum Damaged By Wind
• READ MORE: National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center to Expand

They began to toy with the idea of finding a way to share the airplane with more than the Saturday afternoon $100 hamburger crowd at local airports—and one way to do that would be to establish an aviation museum as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

The creation of the HFM was very much a family project. Bill Anders served as the president until 2008, his wife Valerie as secretary, son Alan as vice president and director of maintenance, and son Greg as vice president, executive director, and webmaster.

The museum began at Bellingham International Airport (KBLI) with a few aircraft, in particular the P-51 parked on the ramp on good weather days. Soon other military planes, many of them trainers and all of them airworthy, were added to the collection.

The aircraft collection continued to grow, and donations began to arrive from the community—a helmet bag and helmet from the Cold War, a grandfather’s flight cap and E6-B from World War II, uniforms and flight gear, and model aircraft. Lots and lots of model aircraft. The artifacts were placed in movable display cases and rolled out of a hangar on good weather days, but so much more stayed stored away, necessitating the need to find a larger space for display.

In 2014 the museum collection moved south to Skagit, a nontowered airport 20 miles south of Bellingham. The airport was built in the 1930s as a joint project of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration. It began with a single runway aligned north-south. When WWII approached, the Navy took possession of the airport and developed it into a training facility, building two more runways to give it the classic triangular-shaped runway configuration so common at military airports during the war.

The 1,847-acre facility has been in civilian hands since 1958 but still bears a resemblance to a 1940s military airfield with two paved runways, 11/29 and 4/22. The airport has the distinction of being one of the last airports in Washington with an Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) on the VFR sectional, although the NDB approach was removed years ago. The NDB was state-of-the-art navigation during WWII.

In all, it was the perfect location to place an aviation museum heavily tied to the military. And it kept growing.

From Hangar to History

One hangar was not enough, so in 2018 the HFM announced plans to expand, breaking ground on a new facility in March 2021 on the south side of the airport. To commemorate the event, Bill and Valerie Anders inscribed their names in cement on one of the steps that leads into the museum. A model of a Saturn V rocket stands guard, and there is a case of NASA mission patches mounted on the red wire wall.

Entering the main display hangar, there is an exhibit on the right about the Anders family. Bill Anders was born in Hong Kong in 1933. When his father, Arthur, was reassigned to Nanjing, China, the family followed.

When the Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937, Arthur Anders was serving as the executive officer of the USS Panay and was wounded in action and transported to a hospital while Bill Anders and his mother fled Nanjing ahead of Japanese forces. This event became known as the Panay Incident.

Another display shows the family of Bill and Valerie Anders and is a balance between Bill’s career and the family life of the late 1950s and ’60s. If you grew up in a military family where deployments are intermixed with dentist appointments and kids’ athletic activities, you will relate. The museum is dedicated to veterans. Conflicts from pre-World War II, WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam, and later are noted in the exhibits.

The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) are represented, and there is an Interstate Cadet that Greg Anders believes is the one Cornelia Fort, a 22-year-old flight instructor, was flying with a student over Pearl Harbor the morning of the Japanese attack in 1941.

The registration number on the HFM aircraft is NC37266. Fort’s original logbook was destroyed in a house fire, and in the replacement logbook she re-created her experience in recording the aircraft as NC37345, which according to Anders, was assigned to a plane that hadn’t even been built at the time of the attack. The Anders’ Cadet, named The Pearl, is one of 11 that can be traced to Pearl Harbor.

The exhibit hangars are arranged so the stationary artifacts, such as the cases with donated memorabilia like uniforms, a 50-mission crush cap, and WWII-era E6-B flight computer, and navigation stopwatch, sit up against the walls, allowing for aircraft to be rolled in and out with minimal disruption.

Some of the aircraft are parked outside on the ramp, and many more are inside with informational signage and videos that play on a continuous loop. 

Collection Highlights

The museum boasts multiple airworthy aircraft. Among them are The Pearl, the P-51D Mustang Val-Halla, A6M2 TORA Zero, A-1 Skyraider Proud America,PT-13 Stearman, PT-19 Cornell, T6F Texan, T6D Texan Hog Wild Gunner, Beechcraft T-34, AT-11 Kansan Buff Baby, F-89 Scorpion, MiG-21 PFM, Cessna O-2 Skymaster, L-19 Bird Dog, L-13 Grasshopper, DHC-2 (L20) Beaver, and two helicopters, an H13 Sioux (a variant of the Bell 47 M*A*S*H helicopter) and Bell UH-1B.

The aircraft are often invited to participate in airshows. Greg Anders, who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and spent 23 years in the service flying A-10s and serving as an instructor pilot in the F-15E and B-52, is the lucky fellow who flies HFM’s P-51D and Hog Wild Gunner at these events.

The museum hosts “Fly Days,” where Greg and his older brother, Alan, who is the museum director of operations and maintenance, fly the warbirds to the delight of visitors. They are the only pilots allowed to fly the museum aircraft, according to Greg.

For many years it was Greg and his father. The HFM web page features an image of Greg flying an F-15 and his father flying the P-51.

Sadly, on June 7, 2024, Bill Anders, 90, was killed during a pleasure flight in his Beechcraft T-34A Mentor. He was flying over the San Juan Islands near his home when he entered a dive and was not able to pull out before striking the water. His death has made for a challenging year for both the family and the museum.

“Putting our sights on that distant future, figuring out how to maintain our museum for the long term is a secondary task to the healing within the
organization for the loss of our founder,” Greg Anders said.

Keeping History Alive

A significant number of model aircraft have been donated to the museum over the years, so much so that it has become more discriminating in what they accept.

“We have a couple of really good model builders,” said Greg. “One was a close friend of my dad’s on Orcas Island named Al Edwards. Those models you see hanging from the ceiling are not even about a fifth of the models he donated to our museum. This guy was a master model builder, an award-winning model maker.”

Part of the future for the museum will be determining the best way for it to fit into the local community. That’s something Bruce Dietsch, HFM volunteer-turned-board member, feels strongly about. At the present time the museum is mostly staffed by volunteers who love aviation and history and want to share their knowledge with others through community involvement and creation of museum-appropriate and inspirational STEM programs.

“We’ve had proposals from people to do STEM programs, like, ‘Why don’t you do robotics or something?’” said Dietsch. “That’s not what I want to see. I want to see something aerospace
related to continue Bill’s legacy.”

More specifically, he would like to create a program that would enable veterans to visit the museum and share their stories with students.

“The mission and goals of the museum, honoring veterans and keeping history alive, are very important to me,” said Dietsch.

‘The ’68 Experience’

Those entering the museum are greeted with an image of the lunar orbiter and the moon and invited to “walk” the first journey there and back. A model of the Saturn 5 rocket—the vehicle that carried the astronauts into orbit—is on the left of the lobby. On the right there’s “The ’68 Experience.”

The room is a walkthrough of the year, with monthly milestones—some unpleasant, such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy—and then lighter things like the prevalence of science-fiction television shows, notably Lost in Space and Star Trek (We have seen the future, and it wears velour).

The 1960s’ youth hippie culture is depicted with references to “Flower Power,” the Beatles, lava lamps, and marijuana. 

There is a nod to technology in the form of the electric typewriter and an image of Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose calculations played a critical role in enabling the moon orbit, standing next to a stack of notebooks as tall as she is.

When you exit the room, be sure to take another look at Earthrise. The image was the crowning accomplishment of a successful mission to orbit the moon. 

According to NASA, “Apollo 8’s flight around the moon gave people hope for the future,” as 1968 was viewed at best as a turbulent year. The space agency notes a telegram from an unknown well-wisher to astronaut Borman summed it up: “Thank you, Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”

The Earthrise photo also became an inspiration for the environmental movement, which led to the creation of Earth Day in 1970. The image’s power has not diminished. See it for yourself at the Heritage Flight Museum.

This feature first appeared in the February Issue 967 of the FLYING print edition.