Walt Disney’s private plane has been fully restored to its 1960s glory after the mothballed and neglected historic interior and exterior of Mickey Mouse One was abandoned and left to rot in the Florida heat and humidity of a Disney World field.
The Palm Springs Air Museum has restored the interior of Walt Disney’s company plane — affectionately known as The Mouse — to how the Grumman Gulfstream I appeared in the 1960s.
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Georgia-based Phoenix Air Group assisted the museum in the meticulous three-year restoration of the plane’s interior.
Walt Disney Imagineering and the Disney Archives spent three years reverentially restoring the exterior of Walt’s Plane that was displayed during the 2022 D23 fan convention at the Anaheim Convention Center.
“This little beauty has been basking in the Florida sun for about the last 40 years,” then Disney CEO Bob Chapek said at the D23 Expo. “Three years ago, I got a call from Imagineering saying that this thing was in mothballs and it was just a shame that something of its historical relevance and importance to the company’s history was sitting out in the heat and humidity of Florida.”
The plane was transported to the Palm Springs Air Museum after the D23 event and has been on display at the museum ever since.
The 15-passenger plane with a three-person crew featured a galley kitchen, two couches, two tables, a drop-down desk and two restrooms — one for the passengers and crew and another for Walt.
Walt Disney started shopping for his own plane in summer 1960 after becoming disillusioned with commercial air travel.
A piston-engine Beechcraft Queen-Air 80 purchased in 1962 was quickly deemed inadequate for increasingly frequent trips from Burbank to New York in preparation for the 1964-65 World’s Fair where It’s a Small World and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln debuted.
The new Grumman Gulfstream G-159 was purchased in late 1963 and outfitted with interior furnishings, cockpit avionics and orange and black livery emblematic of the Walt Disney Productions logo.
Walt and his wife, Lillian, offered input on the custom interior and exterior design of the undecorated aircraft that was delivered with an olive-green primer inside and out.
The interior was outfitted in a rust, orange, brown and gold color scheme that was popular in the 1960s.
A clear divider filled with leaves and long grasses collected from the Disney family backyard separated Walt’s private space on the plane from the rest of the cabin.
The N234MM registration number — with the MM chosen to honor the mouse that started it all — was ultimately transferred from the Queen-Air to the tail of the Gulfstream.
The pilot’s logbook from 1963 showed the Disney Gulfstream traveling from Burbank to Orlando, Key West, New Orleans and New York. Walt Disney often read movie scripts on the short hops between Burbank and Palm Springs.
From his cabin window, Walt surveyed the scrub-filled Central Florida swamps in the 1960s that would become Walt Disney World — then known by the code name Project X.
A customized instrument panel with an altimeter, true airspeed indicator and Mickey Mouse clock allowed the aviation enthusiast to monitor flight conditions from his favorite cabin seat.
A nearby telephone handset gave him a direct line of communication to the pilot in the cockpit.
The flight crew always kept a Mickey Mouse matchbook next to the plane’s Duk-It ashtray for the boss — a lifelong smoker who died of lung cancer at 65.
Passengers flying aboard The Mouse were given a flight bag with a silhouette image of Mickey lounging on the tail of the Gulfstream.
Cocktail napkins featured pilot Mickey and stewardess Minnie flying on a patched together cartoon plywood prop plane version of N234MM — the same tail number as Mickey Mouse One.
Disney pilots often changed the “Two, Three, Four, Metro, Metro” air traffic controller call to “Two, Three, Four, Mickey Mouse” on approach to an airport.
After Disney’s death in 1966, the plane was used for company business and made appearances in two long-forgotten Kurt Russell-starring Disney movies — “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” (1969) and “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t” (1971).
During its 28 years of airborne service, The Mouse flew 20,000 hours and transported 83,000 passengers — including Disney stars Julie Andrews and Annette Funicello and U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
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The Burbank-based aircraft was moved to Orlando in 1985 and decommissioned in 1992. The mothballed plane was part of the studio backlot tour at what is now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios from 1992 to 2014. By then, the sealant around the windows had disintegrated in the Florida heat and allowed leaks and humidity to damage the interior.
After the Disney World attraction closed in 2014, the plastic-wrapped plane sat with a gutted interior in a fenced-off field behind Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park. The twin Rolls Royce engines and everything in the cockpit were sold.
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The aging and deteriorating Disney plane was reportedly offered to Florida air museums with no takers before the Palm Springs Air Museum agreed to become the new home of Mickey Mouse One.
Starting in 2019, Imagineering cleaned up the plane, replaced the windows, sealed the fuselage, added new wing edges and painted the exterior with the original 1960s livery, including the Mickey Mouse registration number.
The plane was disassembled at Disney World and transported cross-country on four flat-bed trucks for the 2022 D23 Expo in California. After the convention, the wings, fuselage and tail were taken apart and once again trucked to Palm Springs where the plane was reassembled.
The Palm Springs Air Museum restored the essentially empty interior to the look of the plane from the 1960s.