Aviation history

Museum Monday: Gallery of Flight at Milwaukee General Mitchell Int’l Airport

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If you like flying, chances are you like airplanes. And if you like airplanes, chances are you like visiting aviation museums once in a while.

Lucky for you there are more than 600 aviation and space-related museums around the country.   Each Monday, StuckatTheAirport.com visits one of them.

This week, it’s the Mitchell Gallery of Flight inside Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport.

Hamiltion Metalplan at aviation museum inside Milwaukee Mitchell Int'l Airport

(Hamilton Metalplane display, courtesy Mitchell Gallery of Flight)

Like the airport, the museum is named in honor of General Billy Mitchell, who is regarded as the Father of the U.S. Air Force.

Mitchell is profiled in the People section of the museum, along with Wisconsin-born fighter ace Dick Bong and other aviators with Wisconsin links, including Charles Lindbergh, who visited the Milwaukee airport in 1927.  Two exhibit cases display artifacts and photos about Captain James Lovell, who is best known for his four Gemini and Apollo spaceflights.

James Lovell exhibit at MKE Gallery of Flight museum

In the Aircraft & Airships section of the museum, you’ll see antique propellers, aviation-related artifacts and loads of models, including a 22-foot, 1/36th scale model of the Graf Zeppelin II (a sister to the Hindenberg) and models of military jets, WWII aircraft and airplanes of all eras.

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport Gallery of Flight exhibit

(Photo by Prateek Bahadur, via Flickr Creative Commons)

Best of all, the museum is located pre-security at Milwaukee General Mitchell International Airport and admission is free.

For information about hours and exhibits, see the Mitchell Gallery of Flight website.

aircraft models displayed at Gallery of Flight Museum in General Mitchell International Airport Milwaukee

(Photo by Prateek Bahadur, via Flickr Creative Commons)

Do you have a favorite aviation/space museum? Please feel free to nominate it for a future edition of Museum Monday.


Museum Monday: LAX Flight Path Learning Center and Museum

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There are close to 700 aviation & space museums around the county and in my recent msnbc.com column Aviation and Space Museums that Soar, I only had room to list six of them. The best of the rest we’ll get to know here, during Museum Mondays on StuckatTheAirport.com.

Last week, it was the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport in Windsor, CT.  This week, we’ll take a look at the Flight Path Learning Center and Museum, in the Imperial Terminal (once the home MGM Grand Airlines) on the south perimeter of Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX FLIGHT PATH Museum

(Photo courtesy: Kate Sedlmayr, KES Consulting.aero)

In addition to special exhibits, Flight Path features historic murals that depict the history of aviation in Southern California along with model airplanes, photographs, airline uniforms and a wide variety of artifacts and memorabilia that tell the story of Southern California-based airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and aerospace companies.

LAX Flight Path Museum airplane models

The exhibits inside the museum are great, but for many the real attraction is what passes by the museum’s windows:  the museum looks out onto LAX runways and visitors can watch airplanes take off and land.

LAX - A380 visits

(Photo courtesy Paul Haney)

Want to visit? The Flight Path Learning Center and Museum is located on the south perimeter of Los Angeles International Airport, a very short drive or cab ride from the airline terminals. Admission is free. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

A great time to visit the Flight Path Learning Center and Museum would be on Saturday July 17th, 2010 at 10 a.m. when the museum presents an audiovisual salute to 50 years of jet passenger service at Los Angeles International Airport that will include are photos and archival film clips of early passenger jets and jet terminal development at LAX.

(Photo courtesy: Kate Sedlmayr, KES Consulting.aero)

Do you have a favorite aviation or space museum? If so, please tell us about it in the comments below and it may end up featured on a future edition of Museum Monday at StuckatTheAirport.com.

Thanks to Paul Haney and Kate Sedlmayr for help with this week’s Museum Monday


Free museum entry for you around the country

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A lot of businesses close during holiday weekends, but during this July 4th holiday plenty of museums, zoos and special attractions will be open.

Thanks to the Bank of America’s Museums on Us program, admission to more than 120 museums will be free this weekend for anyone who has one of the bank’s ATM, credit or check cards.

If you’re visiting New York City, you might head on over to the Bronx Zoo or to the Intrepid Air & Space Museum

Or, if you’re in Detroit, spend a few hours at the Henry Ford Museum (Bank of America free admission on Saturday only),  which has just about everything, including a collection of Presidential limousines and a great Heroes of the Sky exhibit.

(From the Henry Ford Museum collection; a photo of Wilbur Wright in the Flyer)

An even better deal: admission and parking at the Henry Ford Museum is free to everyone on July 16th as part of Target Family Days

Curtiss biplane at Henry Ford

(1917 Curtiss JN 4-D “Canuck” Biplane. On display at the Henry Ford Museum)

See the Museums of Us website to find other museums, zoos and attractions offering free admission this weekend as part of the Bank of America program.  And don’t forget that through Labor Day, September 6, 2010, more than 850 museums around the country are offering free admission anytime to active duty service members and up to five family members as part of the Blue Star Museums program.

Maggots and flying cars. Need we say more?

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Besides the story about the Charlotte-bound US Airways plane that had to return to the gate in Atlanta because maggots started dropping from an overhead bin (watch video at your own risk…)

…the best aviation-related story making the rounds today was about yet another FAA-approved flying car. The Christian Science Monitor’s story about the Terrafugia Transition includes some very cool photos and a video describing the prototype of a two-seater car that can be transformed into an airplane – and purchased for $194,000.

It does seem promising but, The Jetsons aside, it’s not new. Back in 1949, Vancouver, Washington resident Moulton Taylor created a car that did the same thing.

The final version of that car, the Aerocar III, which was actually the sixth version of the car, is on display at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

Flying car

Taylor wasn’t the first to make a flying car. The Smithsonian Institution displays the Waterman Aerobile, which first flew in 1937.

And, from 1950, the Fulton Airphibian

Both the Airphibian and the Aerobile are on display in the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles International Airport.

Museum Monday: New England Air Museum

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I’ve been getting a lot of guff from aviation museum fans upset that I didn’t include their favorite museum in my recent msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar.

Airplanes in museum

I was asking for it.  There are close to 600 aviation and space museums in the country. And with room in the column for just six “top” places, I was sure to disappoint many readers. But now that I’ve read the comments and learned about the cool stuff at so many other aviation-related museums, I’ve decided to add Museum Monday to the line-up here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

To kick things off, I’ve chosen the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport in Windsor, CT.

Bradley is the airport where about 300 Virgin Atlantic passengers recently spent more than four hours stuck on an airplane when their Newark-bound flight was diverted and I’m sure they would have been much happier if they’d been hanging around this museum instead.

The New England Air Museum is the largest aviation museum in New England and has more than 125 aircraft and a huge collection of engines, instruments, aircraft parts, uniforms and personal memorabilia.

A few highlights in the collection include:

The last remaining four-engine American flying boat, the Sikorsky VS-44A, which was donated to the museum by  actress Maureen O’Hara and restored to its original condition;

A B-29 Bomber;

The Bunce-Curtiss Pusher (1912), the oldest surviving Connecticut-built airplane;

And a Kaman K-225 helicopter, the oldest surviving Kaman-built aircraft.

In addition to the artifacts and aircraft on display, the museum has Open Cockpit days, a flight simulator, special events and theme weeks throughout the summer. For example, the week of July 5th is Discover Blimps and Balloons Week.

There’s also a speaker program: this past weekend Sergei N. Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev (Prime Minister of the Soviet Union from 1957-1964) gave a lecture about the Cuban Missile Crisis, as viewed from the Kremlin.

Have a favorite aviation or space museum you’d like to see featured on Museum Monday?

Please nominate it in the comments section below. If you have photos to share, all the better!

(New England Air Museum aircraft photos used in this post courtesy Cliff1066 via Flickr Creative Commons. He’s got dozens of other great photos from the museum on his Photostream as well. )

Airplane pilots pay attention to Bitching Betty

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I don’t have a GPS unit in my car, but I do find myself talking back to the little digital chef that pops up on the screen of my microwave.  So I got a kick out of this Family Matters column from the New York Times in which Bruce Feiler examines the relationships people develop with the voice on their car GPS unit.

I’m linking to the article here because Feiler traces the origin of female voices in automated navigation devices back to airplanes in World War II:

…[W]omen’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male aviators. “It has nothing to do with acoustics or taste,” said Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychologist at the University of Plymouth in England who specializes in “alarms, auditory warnings, beeps and buzzers. They used female voices because they were different,” she said, “and the men were more likely to pay attention to them, particularly in combat situations.

Female voices are still used for warnings in many airplane cockpits and have earned the slang term Bitching Betty among pilots. Patricia Hoyt, who recorded the voice-overs used in many planes, recently revealed herself as Betty in a YouTube video in which she recites common phrases like “auto pilot” and “landing gear.”

Here’s that video.

Aviation and space museums on the must-see list

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Aviation museum Pima Air and Space

(Hanging planes at Pima Air & Space Museum, Tucson, AZ)

I am an idiot.

At least that’s what some fans of Dayton, Ohio’s United States Air Force Museum and many other aviation museums were calling me today.

They read my msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar – and were pissed that their favorite museum wasn’t among the six museums featured in the story.

I’m not surprised. The museums I included in the story are great. But there are around 600 other aviation and space museums around the country and each has its own unique collection and incredible team of supporters and volunteers.  So it was a good bet that a lot of people were going to be disappointed with the short list in my story.

United States Air Force Museum, Dayton

(Northrop B-2 Spirit on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force: U.S. Air Force photo)

What did I miss?

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio for sure.  According to Bobby Schlein, a self-described aviation enthusiast “with a degree and a job in the field,” the museum has“the most extensive collection of defense aircraft… from a replica of the Wright flyer to the F-22 and most in between; as well as a presidential and experiential hangar with many iterations of Air Force One and several very rare (some one of a kind) experimental vehicles including the X-70B Valkyrie.” Another huge plus …no admission fee.

What else?  The Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, MI, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL, the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Museum in Oshkosh, WI, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida were just some of the other “must-see” places people wished were on the list as well.

They are all certainly worth a visit. And in this day and age, when so many art and history organizations are hurting for money and support, they’re all lucky to have such devoted fans.

So apologies if I overlooked your favorite aviation or space museum on this list of six:

FUTURE OF FLIGHT AVIATION CENTER & BOEING TOUR
Everett, Wash.

What you’ll see: On Boeing’s 90-minute tour through the Everett factory, visitors go inside the world’s largest building (by volume) and see the production line for the 747, 767, 777 and the new 787 airplanes. The adjacent Future of Flight Aviation Center displays airplane engines and other giant airplane parts and offers a wide variety of interactive exhibits, including the knob and dial-encrusted flight deck from a 727 airplane.

EVERGREEN AVIATION & SPACE MUSEUM
McMinnville, Ore.

What you’ll see: The museum houses the infamous, huge Howard Hughes Flying Boat HK-1, better known as the Spruce Goose, and more than 50 aircraft from various eras, including a Wright 1903 Flyer replica, a Russian Photon space capsule and a Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird.

Fighter jets Pima Air & Space Museum

(Fighter jets outside the hangar dedicated to World War II Aircraft at the Pima Air & Space Museum; Courtesy Arizona Aerospace Foundation)

PIMA AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
Tucson, Ariz.

What you’ll see: The collection at this 80-acre museum includes more than 300 aircraft and spacecraft, 125,000 aviation-related artifacts, a relocated WWII barracks and a space gallery with a moon rock and a training version of an Apollo space capsule. The museum also displays President John F. Kennedy’s Air Force One, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and hundreds of other rare, important and restored aircraft.

INTREPID SEA, AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
New York

What you’ll see: Located on and in the 900-foot-long ESSEX class aircraft carrier Intrepid, the museum is itself a national historical landmark with a collection that includes a Concorde as well as aircraft from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard. The submarine USS Growler, the only submarine still in existence that fired nuclear missiles is also part of the museum and is open to the public.

SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM
San Diego, Calif.

What you’ll see: Housed in a 1930s-era Ford Motor Company Exposition building, the museum presents science, aviation and space history in a series of themed airplane, spacecraft and artifact-filled galleries that include a 1928 Ford Tri-Motor passenger plane, a working flying replica of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 9 command module and many other one-of-a-kind private, military and commercial artifacts and aircraft.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM

What you’ll see: The world’s largest collection of historic air and spacecraft includes a planetarium, an IMAX theater and thousands of artifacts, including the original Wright 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia from the first lunar landing mission, and a moon rock that you’re allowed to touch. And that’s just at the building on the National Mall. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located near Dulles International Airport, contains many of the museum’s largest objects and artifacts, including the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a deHavilland Chipmunk aerobatic plane and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay.

Have I missed your favorite aviation or space museum? Please share the details in the comments section below.

UFO Anniversary: Flying Saucers first sighted on June 24th, 1947

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UFO Anniversary Flying Saucers

Whether you believe in them or not, today is the anniversary of the day back in 1947 when the “flying saucers” phenomenon began.

People had certainly spotted strange things in the sky before. But it was a pilot flying his private plane near Washington State’s Mt. Rainier that gave the unidentified flying objects such a catchy name.

As described in Historylink.org:

“While flying in his private airplane near Mount Rainier en route from Chehalis, Washington, to his home in Boise, Idaho, Kenneth Arnold was startled by a bright light shortly before 3 p.m., on June 24, 1947. He looked north and saw nine gleaming objects racing southward along the crest of the Cascades. They were roughly circular in form — except for one crescent-shaped object — measured about 50 feet across, and appeared metallic. He watched them for approximately two minutes until they disappeared over Oregon.”

Spooky, right?

During a refueling stop in eastern Oregon, Arnold described his experience to the local newspaper editor, saying that the vehicles flew in and out of the mountain peaks at incredible speeds and in an undulating formation “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”

Stories like that,with details like that, are too juicy to ignore. The report got picked up by newspapers around the country – and around the world – and from then on, unidentified flying objects have become known as “flying saucers.”

If you’re interested in some modern-day stories about aliens at some airports, please see my recent Aliens, UFOs and Crop circles at the airport post, which links to my USATODAY.com column about some of these episodes.

Souvenir Sunday: horseshoes and cigars from Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport

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Each Sunday at StuckatTheAirport.com is Souvenir Sunday – the day we look at some of the fun, inexpensive items for sale in airport gift shops.

This week’s souvenirs come to us from the Blue Grass Airport (LEX) in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Aviation Museum of Kentucky is on airport property and last weekend (June 13, 2010) 15,000 area citizens showed up at the airport to walk, run, bike, skate and play on the new general aviation runway as part of the city’s 2nd Sunday initiative, which encourages people to be active.

That sounds like fun but, but this is Souvenir Sunday. So we sent the airport’s Amy Caudill into the airport shops in search of items that cost around $10, are ‘of’ the city or region and are, ideally, a bit offbeat.

She came up with some winners, including this cute stuffed horse –

And these handmade Maker’s Mark cigars, which have filler seasoned with Maker’s Mark Bourbon.  Each cigar is sealed in a glass tube and hand dipped in sealing wax, just like all those bottles of Kentucky-made Maker’s Mark bourbon.

A box of four bourbon ball chocolates sells for under $10

And these “Authentic racing horseshoes with track dirt from Churchill Downs” sell for under $6.

Did you find a great souvenir last time you were stuck at the airport? If it’s priced around $10, is ‘of’ the city of region and is somewhat offbeat, please snap a photo and send it along. Your souvenir may be featured on a future edition of Souvenir Sunday.

Transportation tidbit: Curtiss Aerocar Travel Trailer

Aviation history, ,

Next week marks the 100th anniversary of the first production (as opposed to home-made, one-off) travel trailer and on Monday the modern-day RV industry will kick off a year-long celebration.  Ground-zero for the festivities is sure to be the RV Museum and Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana, and last week RV historian Al Hesselbart was kind enough to give me a tour of the collection.

There are some awfully classy – and classic – campers, camper trailers, house cars and motor homes on display, including this charming 1954 Holiday Rambler

But while there are priceless gems here at the museum, one bit of RV history Hesselbart covets is this 1930’s Curtiss Aerocar Travel Trailer.  Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who also designed and built bicycles and motorcycles, came up with the design for this aerodynamic fifth-wheel travel trailer and there are just a few of them still in existence.  Al Hesselbart knows where each and every one of them is and has his eye on this one, which he says belongs to a friend who hasn’t quite yet made up his mind about donating this trailer treasure to the RV Museum.

(Photos courtesy Al Hesselbart and the RV /MH Hall of Fame and Museum)