Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport (SDF) is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a special banner exhibit, “SDF Through the Years,” in the Jerry E. Abramson Terminal.
The 13-banner exhibit features historical photos from the 1940s to
the present and includes images of visits by United States Presidents, celebrities, as well as key airport partners such as UPS and the Kentucky Air National Guard 123rd Airlift Wing.
Here’s a preview.
November is Aviation History Month. And that means it’s a good time to look at aviation history displays at airports around the country.
First stop: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX). There, the Phoenix Airport Museum presents numerous history displays. And exhibits are pre-security. Even better, the airport museum has a new Aviation History Guide chock full of information about the exhibits.
The guide is accessible via QR codes by the displays or online.
Gary Martelli, the manager/curator of the Phoenix Airport Museum was kind enough to send these images, along with descriptions.
The World’s Largest Airline exhibition is at Terminal 4, level and looks at American Airlines’ long association with PHX. Look for fun facts, historic images, and rare objects like a ‘Flagship’ pennant that traveled millions of miles across America in the 1930s and 1940s.
You can also take a selfie with a life-size image of 1960s flight attendants dressed in their modern red, white and blue American Beauty uniforms.
The Fly-In Weddings exhibition at Terminal 3, level 1 tells the story of the time when couples could fly into Sky Harbor to get married at an adobe mission-style chapel located right off the runway. The chapel was available for “aerial elopers” for a short time in the 1930s and 1940s. And on display are historic images and the original 200-year-old chapel bell.
At the airport’s PHX Sky Train 44th Street Station you can look up and see one of the world’s few remaining original World War I fighter planes – the SPAD XIII. The biplane is suspended from the ceiling inside the station and is painted in the colors of the aircraft flown by Arizona’s own flying ace, Lt. Frank Luke, Jr.
August 19 was National Aviation Day. The holiday first established in 1939 honors the development of aviation and pioneers of flight. And it also marks Orville Wright’s birthday.
Here’s a fun, history-filled, and (don’t tell anyone) educational round-up of some tweets celebrating the day.
We start and end the list with Mineta San Jose International Airport (SJC), which is hosting an Aviation Week scavenger hunt in the airport, with prizes. And which welcomed 7 passengers and more than 2500 baby chickens on the first commercial flight to land at the airport back in 1949.
The Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum has been closed for a while to reboot with two dozen new exhibits. At least 8 of the galleries are set to open this fall.
One of those returning soon is The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age, an update of the popular exhibition of the same name that has housed the 1903 Wright Flyer since 2003.
As a preview, the museum shared pictures of some of the artifacts we’ll see when the exhibit reopens and pointed us to aviation-themed treasures in the vaults.
12 seconds. That is how long Orville Wright’s first powered flight in the 1903 Wright Flyer lasted. The Wright Brothers used this stopwatch to time the December 1903 flight. The watch will be on display in the reimagined Wright Brothers exhibition.
Once the Wright Brothers showed how ‘easy’ it was to fly, it didn’t take long for the public to become fascinated with airplanes and airplane-themed things. And for flight themes to appear on jewelry, in games, and in art.
Here are a few great objects from the National Air & Space Museum’s collection that we hope we’ll see when the galleries reopen. See you there!
(All images courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum)
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is getting a massive makeover that includes the construction and renovation of 23 galleries.
As part of that process, which is set to be completed sometime in 2025, the whole museum has been closed since March.
But the west wing is scheduled to open in the fall of 2022 with new exhibitions that explore a wide variety of aviation themes, including the Wright Brothers’ story, planets and moons, early aviation, high-speed technology, and other topics.
In advance of the opening, the Smithsonian is adopting a new brand identity and logomark for the National Air and Space Museum that “uses positive and negative space to create a stylized craft that simultaneously suggests both aviation and space flight.”
Look for it at the end of this inspiring “Space for Everyone” video that gives a nod to “airheads, space cases, flight fanatics, armchair astronauts, and the casually curious.” And to those who are “captivated by the miracle of flight and those who are just happy to make their flight.”
See where you land.
The team that produces “Love Field Stories,” the official podcast of Dallas Love Field Airport (DAL), was kind enough to include me as a guest for two upcoming episodes.
The two-parter delves into the unique history of the airport and highlights some of the wonderful art that can be spotted in and around the terminal.
The episodes will be live-streamed on Tuesday, April 12, and on May 10 at 12:30 p.m. (Central) on Love Field’s Facebook and YouTube and will include images of many of the historical events and artwork we discuss.
The podcast can also be heard on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Pandora.
To produce the podcast, DAL teamed me up with Bruce Bleakley, who is an aviation historian and co-author of The Love Evolution: A Centennial Celebration of Love Field Airport and Its Art.
We called it a conversation. But really, it’s me getting to pick the brain of the airport’s historian. I asked Bleakley about how, in 1958, Dallas Love Field’s new terminal building came to have the first moving walkway at any airport in the world. And why there was an ice-skating rink in the terminal. And about the role that Dallas Love Filed played on that day in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president on the DAL tarmac.
In this two-part podcast, we also learn the stories behind some of the great art that passengers walk over and walk by at DAL.
And I get Bleakley to tell us which city’s name is spelled wrong in the airport’s first commissioned piece of art. A detail he didn’t even share in his book.
I hope you’ll tune in!
An old, stale sandwich locked away in a Washington state museum is drawing fresh attention to an aviation daredevil and the 90th anniversary of a record-setting flight.
The sandwich is said to have traveled with Clyde “Upside-Down” Pangborn. But when? It could have been in 1926, when he was wowing spectators as a stuntman in a flying circus, doing aerial stunts such as loops, flying upside down, changing planes in midair, and completing auto-to-airplane transfers. Or it could have been in October 1931, when Pangborn and co-pilot Hugh Herndon, Jr. set a transpacific record by flying nonstop from Misawa, Japan, to East Wenatchee, Washington, in 41 hours and 13 minutes (some say 15 minutes).
Either way, the sandwich that is tucked away a the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center is really, really old and gaining new attention because this month is the anniversary of Pangborn’s record-setting flight. Read more about Pangborn and the sandwich in the story we wrote for The Points Guy.
(Photos courtesy of the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center).
In Seattle, the home base of Stuck at The Airport, we have a new hockey professional ice hockey team, called the Kraken.
The city is pretty darn excited. And so is Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, which is the Kraken’s official airline.
To celebrate, the airline is flying a custom Kraken-themed plane on routes to the team’s away games in cities Alaska Airline serves.
And here’s a nice perk: now through the end of the hockey season, Kraken fans who wear the teams’ jersey can board early on all Alaska flights departing from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) and Paine Field (PAE).
A large 3-part mural by Paul Coze that has been greeting travelers inside Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport for decades has a new home in the airport’s Rental Car Center.
Here’s a time-lapse video of the move.
“The Phoenix,” is a triptych 75 feet wide and 16 feet high and is believed to be the first piece of public art commissioned by the city that was chosen through a public process. The mural debuted when Terminal 2 opened in 1962.
The imagery in the mural includes depictions and symbols that relate to the area’s first inhabitants, the Hohokam, as well as modern tribes and Latino heritage. Also represented are wagon trains, railroads, cattle ranching, mining, and technology. Besides paint media, 52 different materials, including glass and ceramic mosaic tiles, soil and sand from around the state, plastics, aluminum, and gemstones, are used in the mural construction.
So you can imagine that moving this mural was a delicate undertaking. But it looks like it worked out just fine.
July 24th was Amelia Earhart’s birthday and over the weekend many airports marked the day with some great images and historical tidbits. Here’s a sampling.
July 22 was artist Alexander Calder’s birthday, giving us an excuse to share some photos of his work in airports and on airplanes.
The photo above is of Calder in 1957 inspecting the installation of his work originally titled .125, after the gauge of the aluminum elements in Terminal 4 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (then Idlewild Airport). The piece was later redubbed Flight.
Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) also has a work by Alexander Calder in its collection. This piece is titled, appropriately enough, Pittsburgh.
Calder’s work also appeared on Braniff International Airways airplanes in the mid-1970s.
The first was a Douglas DC-8 known as Flying Colors of South America. The second was a Boeing 727-200 named Flying Colors of the United States.
To learn more about the airplanes Calder painted for Braniff, see this article from 2020 by Chris Sloan in Airways Magazine.
On Monday, the National Air and Space Museum, and many others, marked the 100th anniversary of the day Bessie Coleman earned her pilot’s license – and changed history.
Click through the links in the tweets below to learn more about this incredible woman and some of the men and women who were inspired by her accomplishments.
