Fairbanks -- A middle-age makeover, complete with a nose job, is giving a lift to an aging workhorse with a new role. The 44-year-old Douglas DC-6 has been carefully reconfigured by a team of 40 workers so it can take on a new role of carrying fuel to the Bush.

Mechanics have spent the past 14 months restoring and refitting the four-engine veteran to Federal Aviation Administration specifications. The plane's captain, Ron Klemm, added patriotic nose art and rechristened the flying ship The Spirit of America. "It's a sign of the times," Klemm said, saying the Sept. 11 attacks inspired the name and a furled portion of the stars and stripes to flank the head of an American eagle.

The DC-6 itself was born in the U.S.A. on Jan. 1, 1958, the last year the plane was made. But it quickly departed for foreign shores. For its first two decades, the plane ferried passengers in Western Europe and Africa. Then it came back across the Atlantic to Canada in 1975. The plane was brought north in the late 1990s from Abbotsford, British Columbia, where it spent a couple of decades dousing Canadian forest fires. Then it spent a few years among a dozen other derelicts in an aviation bone yard at Fairbanks International Airport. But it wasn't forgotten.

http://www.adn.com/alaska/story/1128947p-1236372c.html