Miss Montana:

The Improbable Second Life of a Missoula Cargo Plane

Introduction

At the Museum of Mountain Flying in Missoula sits an airplane that spent most of its working life hauling freight, fighting fires, and dodging mountain weather with no expectation that anyone would remember its tail number. Built too late for the war it was designed to fight, it instead spent nearly three decades as a workhorse for a regional air-freight company, carried smokejumpers into one of the deadliest wildfires in United States Forest Service history, vanished into obscurity for the better part of two decades, and then, in old age, was rebuilt by volunteers and flown across the North Atlantic to take part in a commemoration of the invasion it never got to join. Today it carries the name Miss Montana and, since 2023, an official state designation as “Montana’s Airplane” (Museum of Mountain Flying). Its history is less a story of glamour than of persistence, and it offers a useful case study in how ordinary machines acquire outsized meaning.

Origins as a Wartime Surplus C-47

The aircraft, registered N24320, was built by the Douglas Aircraft Company in May 1944 as a C-47 Skytrain, the military transport version of the commercial DC-3 (Museum of Mountain Flying). The C-47 was one of the more consequential aircraft designs of the twentieth century, prized for its ability to operate from short, rough airstrips while carrying troops, cargo, or wounded soldiers, and thousands were built for Allied service in the Second World War. N24320, however, was delivered to the Army after the war in Europe and the Pacific had effectively been decided, and it never saw combat (Douglass). Like many surplus C-47s produced in the war’s final year, it sat idle before being sold off as military surplus, at which point it became available to the civilian aviation market that absorbed thousands of these aircraft in the late 1940s.

Bob Johnson and Missoula’s Aerial Fire Economy

In 1946, Bob Johnson, head of Missoula’s Johnson Flying Service, purchased the airplane and put it to work in western Montana’s backcountry aviation economy (Missoulian, “Story of 75-Year-Old DC-3”). Johnson Flying Service was among several regional operators that had grown alongside the Forest Service’s expanding aerial firefighting program, ferrying smokejumpers, cargo, and mail into terrain that had few roads and fewer airfields.The airplane’s arrival in Missoula that spring was ordinary enough that the local newspaper described it only as a war-surplus transport, with no indication that it would ever be more than one plane among many in the company’s fleet (Missoulian, “Story of 75-Year-Old DC-3”). It would remain in Johnson’s service, under various pilots and mechanics, for close to thirty years.

The Mann Gulch Fire

That anonymity ended, in the historical record if not in daily use, on August 5, 1949. A lightning-caused fire had been reported that morning in the Helena National Forest, in a steep, remote drainage above the Missouri River known as Mann Gulch (Forest History Society). District Ranger Robert Jansson requested smokejumpers from the Missoula base, and N24320 carried fifteen of them, along with foreman R. Wagner Dodge, to the fire that afternoon, where they joined a lone fire guard already on the ground (U.S. Forest Service, “75th Anniversary”). The fire, judged manageable when the crew jumped, blew up suddenly in the early evening, driven by high winds and dry fuel, and cut off the men’s route to the river. Dodge attempted to save the crew by lighting an escape fire and lying down in the burned area it created, an improvised technique that had no established precedent in Forest Service practice at the time. Only Dodge and two jumpers, Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee, who found shelter in a rock crevice, survived; twelve smokejumpers and the fire guard, James Harrison, died (Forest History Society). The Mann Gulch fire remains one of the formative disasters in American wildland firefighting, prompting the Forest Service to revise training, safety protocols, and its understanding of fire behavior in mountainous terrain (U.S. Forest Service, “75th Anniversary”). N24320 was the aircraft that delivered the crew to the gulch that day, a fact confirmed independently by both the Museum of Mountain Flying, which now displays the airplane partly as a memorial to the men who died, and by regional newspaper coverage of the fire’s anniversary (Museum of Mountain Flying; Missoulian, “Photos: Public Offered Inside Look”).

Decades of Service and the Monongahela River Crash

The airplane’s subsequent history was far from routine. While it continued flying for Johnson Flying Service carrying smokejumpers, backcountry cargo, charter passengers, and forest-pest spray equipment, it also survived a major accident on December 22, 1954. Carrying military service members on a holiday charter flight, N24320 suffered fuel exhaustion and ditched at night in the icy Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Though the initial ditching was relatively smooth, the captain and nine passengers tragically drowned attempting to reach shore. Bob Johnson subsequently salvaged the plane from the riverbed, rebuilt it, and returned it to active flight service for another two decades. When Johnson Flying Service was sold to Evergreen International Aviation in the mid-1970s, the airplane left Montana and passed through a series of owners and operators outside the state for roughly twenty-five years, its connection to Mann Gulch and to Missoula fading from public notice (Museum of Mountain Flying).

Rediscovery and the Return to Missoula

In 2001, Dick Komberec, a retired Delta Air Lines captain who had flown for Johnson Flying Service earlier in his career, located the airplane near Memphis, Tennessee (Museum of Mountain Flying). Komberec, who had co-founded the Museum of Mountain Flying at Missoula International Airport, raised the funds to purchase it and flew it back to Montana that October, reportedly routing the return flight over Mann Gulch itself (Douglass). For the next seventeen years, the airplane served as the museum’s centerpiece, though it did not fly; members would periodically run its engines on the tarmac, but it remained, in effect, a static exhibit known informally as the Mann Gulch airplane (Museum of Mountain Flying).

Restoration and the D-Day Squadron

That changed in 2018, when museum leaders Eric Komberec and Bryan Douglass learned of the D-Day Squadron, a coalition of American C-47 and DC-3 owners preparing to fly the North Atlantic route to Normandy, France, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings in 2019 (Douglass). The museum committed to restoring N24320 to flying condition and joining the effort, a decision that required volunteers to overhaul the engines and propellers, replace decades-old wiring, and install modern avionics while preserving the airplane’s original systems where possible; organizers later estimated more than ten thousand volunteer hours went into the project (Destination Missoula, cited in Museum of Mountain Flying background materials; Douglass). It was at this point that the airplane, which had never carried an official name, was christened Miss Montana, a name borrowed from the nose art of an unrelated B-25 bomber flown by a Montana pilot during the war, chosen to represent the state on an international stage (Museum of Mountain Flying).

The restoration was documented closely by regional press. The Missoulian reported delays caused by generator problems ahead of the planned May 2019 departure and covered the aircraft’s first test flight in eighteen years that same month (Missoulian, “Miss Montana’s Departure Delayed”). Aviation trade coverage in AOPA Pilot magazine likewise tracked the project, noting the contrast between the airplane’s condition as a static museum piece and its appearance after restoration (AOPA). On May 19, 2019, a six-person crew departed Missoula, flying by stages to Connecticut before joining the D-Day Squadron’s crossing to Europe by way of Presque Isle, Maine; Goose Bay, Newfoundland; Iceland; and Scotland. The crew arrived in England in time to join the international fleet for the Normandy flyover commemoration on June 5 and 6, 2019—a full seventy years after the Mann Gulch fire (Missoulian, “Tracking Miss Montana”). The flight was supported in part by corporate fuel and lubricant donations, and it drew national television coverage, including a segment on CBS Sunday Morning (Missoulian, “Preparing for Takeoff”).

Later Service and Official Recognition

Following the Normandy trip, Miss Montana continued to fly in a limited capacity, including a widely reported mission to assist with disaster relief in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian in 2019, and it has since served as a training and promotional aircraft for the museum, occasionally appearing at regional commemorations such as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Mann Gulch fire at Helena in August 2024 (Missoulian, “Photos: Public Offered Inside Look”). In 2023, Governor Greg Gianforte formally designated the aircraft “Montana’s Airplane,” a title the Museum of Mountain Flying now uses in its own institutional materials (Museum of Mountain Flying; Daily Inter Lake). The museum has since planned an expansion by opening a new branch at Glacier Park International Airport in Kalispell to display artifacts and host aircraft including Miss Montana (Daily Inter Lake).

Conclusion

The history of Miss Montana resists easy sentiment. For most of its service life it was an unremarkable cargo plane, distinguished mainly by the misfortune of having been present at Mann Gulch, an event that had nothing to do with the airplane’s design or performance and everything to do with weather, terrain, and the limits of firefighting knowledge in 1949. Its later transformation into a named, ceremonially recognized aircraft came only after a specific, well-documented restoration effort undertaken by identifiable people for a specific occasion. What the airplane’s history demonstrates, more than the durability of a particular machine, is how a community of volunteers, museum founders, and regional institutions can deliberately construct historical significance around a surviving artifact, turning a retired freight plane into a vehicle, quite literally, for public memory.

Works Cited

AOPA. “First Look: ‘Miss Montana’ Debuts.” AOPA Pilot, 1 June 2019, https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/june/pilot/first-look-miss-montana. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Daily Inter Lake. “‘Miss Montana,’ a Historic C-47 That Was Named ‘Montana’s Airplane’ in 2023 by Governor Gianforte.” Daily Inter Lake, 17 Jan. 2025, https://dailyinterlake.com/photos/2025/jan/17/482547/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Douglass, Bryan. “Saving and Restoring a Montana Treasure.” Montana Press, 15 Dec. 2022, https://www.montanapress.net/post/taking-flight-saving-and-restoring-a-montana-treasure. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Forest History Society. “Mann Gulch Fire, 1949.” Forest History Society, https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/famous-fires/mann-gulch-fire-1949/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. “Miss Montana’s Departure Delayed.” Missoulian, https://missoulian.com/news/local/miss-montana-s-departure-delayed/article_3cec0682-a247-58ab-a537-78fecdfd6aed.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. “Photos: Public Offered Inside Look into Miss Montana.” Missoulian, https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/photos-public-offered-inside-look-into-miss-montana/collection_57173bfe-8915-576b-b3d9-c78aafa9c456.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. “Preparing for Takeoff: The Making of Miss Montana to Normandy.” Missoulian, https://missoulian.com/news/local/preparing-for-takeoff-the-making-of-miss-montana-to-normandy/article_1e0696be-8804-5ee6-a554-2f621e0837ec.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. “Story of 75-Year-Old DC-3 Marked by Tragedy, Triumph.” Missoulian, 10 Aug. 2019, https://missoulian.com/news/local/article_5384ca79-706d-5992-8919-e29899178b02.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. “Tracking Miss Montana.” Missoulian, 22 May 2019, https://missoulian.com/news/local/tracking-miss-montana/article_026e20df-3f3a-5766-920b-a4230c14c822.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

Museum of Mountain Flying. “Miss Montana.” Museum of Mountain Flying, https://www.museumofmountainflying.com/miss-montana. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.

U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. “The 75th Anniversary of the Mann Gulch Fire.” USDA Forest Service Research and Development, 5 Aug. 2024, https://research.fs.usda.gov/firelab/articles/75th-anniversary-mann-gulch-fire. Accessed 29 Aug. 2026.