ANDY COMER: What happened to Rio Hondo's air museum?

It’s not often that the Rio Grande Valley gets one of its cities mentioned on national television, much less on an obscure cable show about World War II aviation.

“Here at the Texas Air Museum in Harlingen (spoken with a soft “g” as in “Gus”), near the Mexican border, is one of the few surviving short-nosed (Focke-Wulf) 190s,” the snobby Wings of the Luftwaffe narrator said.

“He must mean Harlingen,” I thought to myself. Sure enough, the late-night show on the Military Channel was referring to the city in between Brownsville and McAllen. (Side note: The last time I can remember the Valley being mentioned on anything besides the news was on a Discovery Channel program about mythical, humongous black birds that are allegedly big enough to swoop up children; the show claimed that a guy in Brownsville — who was delivering newspapers early in the morning — saw one sitting on top of a telephone pole.)

Anyway, for those of you who don’t know what a Focke-Wulf 190 is, congratulations — you probably have a life. An FW-190 is a single-engine, propeller-driven German airplane produced during World War II that was a serious threat to Allied domination of the skies over Europe (in case you’re wondering, we won the war, thankfully). Thousands of FW-190s were made, yet it’s nearly impossible to find one today anywhere in the world — which is why I couldn’t believe a tiny museum in South Texas, of all places, had such a rare relic. As a major aviation and history buff who grew up practically next door to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, I knew I had to get to the Texas Air Museum as soon as I could.

A Google search for “Harlingen Air Museum” produced a map, address and phone number for the place. My very patient girlfriend and I hopped in the car and drove out to the location last weekend. I was quietly exploding inside with anticipation at the chance to see a piece of history usually reserved for the likes of the Smithsonian. Nerd alert!

When approaching the location in Rio Hondo, which is next to a newer high school, I noticed a small hangar similar to the one shown on Wings of the Luftwaffe — the hangar even had an airplane painted on the side of it. My dorky little heart was doing somersaults. Unfortunately, it was all too good to be true: Upon closer inspection, we found that the hangar had been converted into a reception hall. After inquiring with the locals at a nearby gas station, my suspicions were confirmed; the small museum was no more.

Of course, we could have saved ourselves the trip by simply calling the phone number listed — which we did, only after nearly getting lost. The man who answered said he gets calls all the time from people wanting to visit the museum, but that he didn’t know anything about the place. On top of that, the aforementioned Wings of the Luftwaffe program was produced in 1992, according to the show’s credits — 18 years ago — so I was going on some very outdated information to begin with, not to mention some faulty facts courtesy of Google.

So if the museum is now a reception hall, where did the airplanes go? And what about David Jones, the man who built and flew a replica FW-190 that was featured at the end of the Wings of the Luftwaffe show — what happened to him? He seems like an interesting guy.

It seems plane crazy to me that a unique element of the Valley seems to have simply vanished.

Andy Comer is the slot editor and a columnist for The Monitor. Contact him at acomer@themonitor.com with feedback or suggestions for future columns.