To The Scrapheap? -- Supersonic Museum `Parish'-Ing

KISSIMMEE, Fla. - America's Supersonic Transport plane, the SST, may be taxiing down the runway to its final destination: the scrapheap.

Since October, when the Osceola New Life Assembly of God moved into the old SST Air Museum building, Pastor Ernie DeLoach has wanted the SST out of his church. The 288-foot-long, 50-foot-high plane came free with the building and now stands in the way of the church's renovation plans. The Kissimmee church is about 15 miles east of Walt Disney World, near Orlando.

The airplane, a full-scale metal mock-up of the planned SST, was nearly sold this week to a scrap dealer for $10,000, but the deal fell through at the last minute.

DeLoach, who is known among his colleagues as ``the plane preacher,'' says he wants the SST gone in the next 30 days, and if he gets his way, the SST's long, strange trip will either end in a blaze at a metal recycling facility or be saved by aviation buffs.

The airplane's size is the reason it may be carted off in pieces to the scrapheap. There are only two ways to get the SST out of the church: hack it to bits or carefully disassemble it piece by piece.

Aviation experts say they believe it will cost at least $100,000 to take the plane apart and move it to another location and reassemble it. Though the historians and experts say the SST is an important historical artifact and should be saved, no one has come forward with a plan or money to keep the SST from being destroyed.

``It would be a shame to destroy an artifact like that,'' said Arthur Sanfelici of Aviation Heritage magazine.

The SST, you might remember, was going to be America's answer to the British/French Concorde supersonic jetliner. But under pressure from environmentalists who thought the SST's sonic booms and pollution would harm the atmosphere and those who thought the SST would be a waste of money, Congress killed financing for the project in early 1971. The United States had spent more than $1.2 billion on development.

To some, the death of the SST was a huge blow to national pride, especially since the British and French had combined forces on the Concorde and the Soviets, too, were building a supersonic plane - the TU-144.

For more than a year after the SST, being built by The Boeing Co., was killed, there was a flicker of hope that the project might be revived. During that time, the metal model of the SST, a non-flying, pre-prototype airplane engineers were using to test design principles, sat in a hangar at Boeing's Seattle plant.

Boeing finally disposed of the SST in a sealed bid auction. Marks Morrison, a Nebraska millionaire, bought the airplane for $31,119 and dreamed of creating an aviation museum. He eventually joined forces with Don Otis of California.

Morrison and Otis, former pilots, said they couldn't bear to see the SST destroyed. Morrison had the money to finance the project. Otis, a scrap dealer who specialized in buying old rockets, airplanes and other government junk, contributed the expertise to move the giant bird.

With Disney World drawing a record number of tourists to Central Florida and the Kennedy Space Center just 60 miles to the east, Morrison thought the Orlando area would be an ideal place for the SST to be

housed in a museum with other aviation and space artifacts.

And so in January 1973, the SST was taken apart, loaded on seven railroad cars and transported to Kissimmee. There it was reassembled on a huge concrete slab that had been poured in a cow pasture 15 miles east of Disney World.

Some of the Boeing workers who built the SST in Seattle had taken it apart there, followed it to Florida and helped reassemble it.

The SST Air Museum opened to the public on July 4, 1973. Initially, it drew big crowds. It had a nice collection of historical artifacts ranging from a Mercury space capsule to several rare World War II airplanes.

Attendance steadily declined and the museum closed in 1981. The aerospace and aviation artifacts on display eventually found new homes, except the SST. The plane was too big and expensive to move without destroying it or tearing down the building.

The museum became entangled in several lawsuits before the property finally was sold to a church. The church used the old museum for services until 1988. The building sat vacant for about a year until the Osceola New Life Assembly of God bought it and got the SST in the deal for free.

When the church's congregation moved into the building last year, DeLoach began preaching in the shadow of the massive airplane.

``It was just unreal. It just blew me away. . . . What I like about it is that it's in the back of the auditorium. When I stand on the platform to preach or read my Scripture, I can't help but see the tail parts stuck up there. USA Supersonic - it's just something else. The kids are fascinated about the plane. They say, `Pastor, give us a tour, take us up,' '' DeLoach said.

Though he is fond of the plane and wishes it could be saved, he knows it will have to go.

``We need to go ahead and start our renovations, start fixing up inside, start dressing it up, and we need to build some Sunday school classrooms. We want to build a two-story educational plant in here,'' DeLoach said, pointing to the wing.

Not even the most creative of architects has found a way to leave the plane intact and carry out the church's expansion plans, DeLoach said.

Even though the museum has been closed for nearly a decade, visitors who have seen the SST still drop by to see the plane.

``People always seem to express remorse that we didn't build it,'' said DeLoach's wife, Kaye.