Missoula, Montana’s Museum of Mountain Flying –  The Boneyard That Became a Museum

Still, Bob Johnson, visionary and entrepreneur, saw a need. He founded the Johnson Flying Service that year, and for nearly the next fifty years, the JFS would fly Missoulians and visitors to Missoula wherever they needed to go in their fleet of planes. In the early days, Johnson would charge folks a penny a pound to tour the skies above Garden City and surrounding environs.

Eventually, JFS would win the government’s contract for providing planes to airdrop smokejumpers into the mountains. The first such drop would occur in 1940, when a Travel Air was used to drop a firefighter near Moose Creek. In 1949, amid the tragedy of the Mann Gulch Fire, immortalized by Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire, the C-47/DC-3 N24320 now known as Miss Montana flew the smokejumpers to the drop zone in the ill-fated mission that would see the deaths of 13 firefighters.

By March 31, 1950, their fleet had grown to include 2 DC-3s, 3 Ford Tri-Motors, and 26 smaller aircraft, and in 1963 alone they made $902,000 in revenue—82% of which came from US Forest Service contracts.