Greg Ward began working on gasoline-powered model airplanes when he was 6 years old.

For the past 36 years, he’s dedicated his time to piecing together much larger-scale airplane models.

Ward, now in his mid-60s, heads up the Air Zoo’s aircraft restoration team.

The first plane he worked on at the aerospace and science museum was a wooden Fairchild PT-23, a restoration project he tackled over his first eight years at the Air Zoo.

On June 6, 2013, Ward accompanied Air Zoo President and CEO Troy Thrash and three others to Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, on the 69th anniversary of D-Day, they laid eyes for the first time on a recently-recovered FM-2 Wildcat 57039 that had spent the previous 68 years on the bottom of Lake Michigan.

“It was sitting in a pile, broken in half,” Ward said. “The wing was shredded. The left landing gear was ripped in half. … Troy all but turned around and walked out.”

Two months later that rusted-out, mussel-covered pile was trucked to Portage, where for the past 11 years it has ever so slowly taken on its original shape.

To get it there, it’s taken over 50,000 hours of work, Thrash said. The bulk of the work has been done by the likes of Ward, Assistant Restoration Manager Dan Brant and a team of 80 restoration volunteers. In total, however, over 1,500 people, from middle schoolers to senior citizens have volunteered their time.

One of the most maneuverable fighter planes of its time, the Wildcat was one of 80 training planes to have wound up on the bottom of Lake Michigan during World War II.

“Every day from 1942 to 1945, two planes would leave the Navy Pier and go out about 20 miles off the coast of Chicago as part of the aircraft carrier qualification training pilots needed so they could go off to fly in the war,” Thrash said.

Landing a plane on a moving ship is usually the toughest challenge for any pilot in training, Thrash said. Landing them on cargo ships that were about two-thirds the size of an aircraft carrier was even tougher.

While over 15,000 pilots went on successful training missions in that time span over Lake Michigan, 130 planes did crash, Thrash said. Eight of the pilots in those training accidents died, he said.

The pilot of the FM-2 Wildcat 57039 that went down, Ensign William E. Forbes, not only survived his crash, but went on to become a pilot in the war and live a long, happy life afterward, Thrash said.

Forbes found good fortune in that regard.

On Dec. 18, 1944, as his plane approached the edge of the deck on the USS Sable, while preparing to take flight, the Wildcat’s engine sputtered and stopped.

“On a normal-sized aircraft carrier he could have just let it roll and stopped the aircraft,” Thrash said. “But he was too close to the edge of the shortened deck. So, he basically just rolled off the front and then got (hit).”

With Forbes still in the cockpit, the plane was pulled around the back of the ship, where the tail of the aircraft was sheered off by a paddle wheel. While Forbes was saved, his plane sank 200 feet to the lake’s bottom where it rested for 68 years, before being retrieved on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in 2012.

Eight months went by before it made it to the Air Zoo.

The story of its restoration has been a unique one in that it occurred on the display floor of the Air Zoo’s Flight Recovery Center, allowing visitors to see the work in progress and get hands on with history.

Ward and Brant worked with volunteers to build a gigantic rotisserie so that they could turn the plane while working on it, keeping them from having to lay underneath the plane for over two years of restoration time.

Pieces were built to spec and obtained from other museums to help bring the plane back to life.

After over 10 years of work, the aircraft is now just weeks from being fully restored to “museum quality.” It will not fly again, Thrash said, as the Navy — which still owns the plane — does not want to invest in the decade-long restoration of the plane, only to risk having it crash again.

“Given how it looked when it arrived, the status, the destruction … you thought there’s no way this is going to look like an airplane and little by little, every little piece of time, to see it evolve, it’s just been absolutely amazing,” Brant said.

Now 11 years since first laying eyes on pieces of the aircraft, and two days after the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Thrash and his team are ready to celebrate the plane’s restoration.

A free, public open house will take place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 8, at the Air Zoo’s Flight Discovery Center, at 3101 E Milham Ave. The plane will remain on display throughout June at the museum, before departing to its permanent home at the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts.