Del Mar Times/Encinitas Advocate
August 14, 2017
ENCINITAS, CA August 3, 2017 - Jose Junco of High Performance Auto Detail was handpicked out of hundreds of detailers nationwide for a coveted spot on the prestigious Air Force One Detailing Team at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. He just returned from a 7-day detailing event led by Master automotive and aircraft detailer Renny Doyle of Detailing Success.
Junco and the rest of the Air Force One Detailing Team who over the past 15 years, has restored the first presidential jet known as Air Force One to its original glory, continue their annual role of caretakers to the famous plane, which served as a flying Oval Office for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
In addition to Air Force One, this year, the team also cleaned, polished, and applied protective coatings to 16 additional aircraft on display at the museum. Some of the planes for which the team has been restoring include the now retired supersonic Concorde Alpha Golf; a remarkable WWII B-52 Stratofortress Bomber whose all-aluminum fuselage has been under restoration for a couple of years. This is the first year the plane’s wings were reattached and the team began polishing them. “It will take a couple of years to bring it back completely, but every year it looks better after a polishing!” says Junco.
The team also tackled the engine rings on the high recognizable first “Jumbo Jet” Boeing 747; and for the first time, began polishing a 1934 Boeing 247, which will fall under their continued care through 2020.
“When I started my detailing business, it was not a career where I expected to be detailing historical, multimillion-dollar museum treasures,” says Junco. “I am honored to be joining such an exclusive team of experienced high-end detailers and to have had the opportunity to polish such an iconic piece of American aviation history.”
The annual Air Force One Detailing project has become one of the most prestigious detailing projects on record. “When this project began nearly 15 years ago, a Bush Administration official asked me to save this famous plane, which was falling into ruin on the tarmac at Seattle’s Museum of Flight,” says Renny Doyle. “I had only five detailers with whom I trusted on such a project and we were horrified at the condition of the aircraft. We have been very successful in reversing the plane’s deterioration over the years, and now the museum has entrusted the plane into the Team’s care contractually through 2020. There is no room for mistakes on multimillion-dollar aircraft, and that’s why I brought on Jose with his exceptional skill and eye for detail.”
It is important for car and truck owners in Encinitas, Solano Beach, Rancho Santa Fe, Del Mar, all the way to Carlsbad and Oceanside to know that Jose’s experience cleaning historic paint and polishing bright work is a huge benefit as a detailer. In order to restore, maintain, and protect the exterior of any vehicle, it helps to understand how the environment interacts with your surface paint, hard plastics, metals, and even fabrics and leather. Jose is not just a detailer, but he is a paint correction specialist who saves more aging vehicles on a daily basis than iconic airplanes!
Air Force OneKnown as Special Air Missions (SAM) 970, the first Air Force One presidential jet entertained many international VIPs such as Nikita Khrushchev and Henry Kissinger. For more than a decade, it lived on the open tarmac exposed to Seattle’s notorious climate. In spite of the team’s initial success back in 2003, it has taken more than a dozen years to restore it to as close to its natural glory as possible.
In just the last year, the plane has been relocated under a covered hangar in the new open-air Airpark Pavilion, but it is still exposed to Seattle’s dampness. The team has entered into a “preservation” rather than restoration stage with the plane, and it still requires an annual cleaning and polishing – a responsibility assigned exclusively to Doyle’s Air Force One Detailing Team until 2020.
For more information about Jose Junco’s selection to the 2017 Air Force One Detailing Team at the Seattle’s Museum of Flight, and his experience detailing more than a dozen historic airplanes, contact him at (760) 994-3462, or Kimberly Ballard at (256) 653-4003. High resolution pictures available from this year’s event.
