At 1665 Newport Road in Colorado Springs, Colorado, sits a restaurant with a four-engine military tanker attached to the building. The plane is real. You can eat inside it.
It opened as Solo's Restaurant on May 10, 2002. The aircraft is a Boeing KC-97 built in 1953. It flew for the Air Force and later sat on display in Fort Worth. Eight semitrailers brought it to Colorado in late 2001.
The name changed to The Airplane Restaurant on December 4, 2008. Nothing else did. The family that built the place still runs it, and it passed 24 years in May 2026.
Today the fuselage holds 42 of the 275 seats. One wing crosses the building wall into the dining room, and the cockpit stays open for customers to climb into.
A 1953 tanker, dismantled and trucked west
In late 2001, a Boeing KC-97 air-refueling tanker was taken apart in a Fort Worth aviation complex and loaded onto eight semitrailers.
Flying it out wasn't practical. It had sat as a static display for years, so its eight pieces went to Colorado by road.
The buyer was a Colorado Springs restaurant operator who had started flying as a chemistry student and had been in the restaurant business since 1978.
He'd spent 10 years on a problem with two halves: the right aircraft for a dining room, and a property where a full-size four-engine tanker could sit.
Of the three suitable planes he found, the KC-97 was the cheapest.
The site was 1665 Newport Road, immediately west of Colorado Springs Airport.
What 53-0283 did before it served dinner
Boeing built airframe 53-0283, one of 816 KC-97 tankers the Air Force ordered.
These were propeller planes assigned to refuel jet bombers, which is harder than it sounds: the tanker has to fly fast enough for the jet behind it.
From 1955 to 1963 it flew with the 70th Air Refueling Squadron at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas.
The squadron supported reconnaissance flights during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, though this airframe's own part in them isn't documented.
Desert storage came on May 4, 1965.
It flew again from April 23, 1970, with the 106th Air Refueling Wing in New York, rebuilt with two jet engines outboard of the four piston ones to fix the speed problem.
Top speed after that: 400 mph.
By the mid-1980s the flying was over and it sat on display in Fort Worth, where the museum around it closed in 1992.
A wing through the wall
The Colorado Springs property already had a 6,400-square-foot restaurant building on it, which spared the project a kitchen and a dining room but not the hard part.
Crews reassembled the tanker on the lot and positioned it so the fuselage stayed outside while one wing ran through the exterior wall.
That wing brought two engine nacelles and their propellers indoors, and the building had to be rebuilt around them.
Inside the fuselage, the old cargo section became booth seating along both sides, with new aluminum facing and track lighting.
The cockpit stayed where it was, instruments and switches intact, open for customers to climb into.
One table in the main room looks out through a window toward the landing gear.
Solo's opened with 42 seats in the plane
The restaurant opened on May 10, 2002, as Solo's, and the owners called opening day its first flight.
The seating told you what kind of place it was going to be: 230 seats in the conventional dining room, 42 in the airplane.
Colorado Springs tower frequency ran over the public-address system in the early years.
Hundreds of aviation photographs went up on the walls, and models hung from the ceiling, one of them an eight-foot B-17.
The menu was ordinary American food wearing aviation names, the Piper Club and the Air Tower Nachos alongside burgers, steaks, and ribs.
Pilots landing at Colorado Springs could walk over from the general aviation ramp in five minutes.
The plane sat so close to the hotel next door that people kept assuming it belonged to the Radisson.
From Solo's to The Airplane Restaurant
On December 4, 2008, the business changed its name to The Airplane Restaurant.
Everything else stayed: the address, the phone number, the owners, the aircraft, the booths.
TheAirplaneRestaurant.com replaced the old Solo's web identity, and locals picked up the new name within the month.
The collection inside kept growing through the Solo's years and after: squadron patches, autographed photographs, navigation charts, uniforms, and images connected to prisoners of war and astronauts.
An older printed menu gave over a long section to KC-97 history and aerial refueling.
By 2025 the walls still carried patches and photographs, and flight charts were in use on the dining tables.
The boom that sat on the ground for five years
The plane arrived in Colorado without the refueling boom that makes a tanker look like one. The rear of the fuselage just ended.
The owner spent years hunting a replacement and got one around 2017, close to 1,000 pounds of it.
Then it stayed on the ground. Nobody there knew how to hang a boom on a retired tanker safely, so it lay there for five years.
On September 28, 2022, a group from the Alaska Air National Guard's 168th Wing came in for lunch during a leadership course in town.
One was a maintenance sergeant with more than 22 years on KC-135 refuelers, who had done this exact work as a hydraulic specialist.
He called the others. Nine volunteered, and the boom went on in about an hour.
The refueling system doesn't work. The aircraft has carried the full tanker profile ever since.
What it's like to eat in a KC-97 in 2026
The restaurant passed 24 years on May 10, 2026, still run by the family that built it, with long-term staff alongside them.
Capacity runs to 275 seats, and 42 of them are in the fuselage, which means people regularly wait for an airplane booth while open tables sit in the main room.
The cockpit is still open. Kids climb in and work the switches, and so do adults.
Air Force Academy reunions book the place. So do aviation clubs, veterans' groups, and visitors staying in the airport hotel district next door.
Doors open at 11 a.m. every day, closing at 8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
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