Aviation Museums

New aviation museum in Oklahoma

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 Oklahoma’s El Reno Airport is now home to a new aviation museum called the Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field.

Founder Tony Caldwell is taking his private collection public, with a display of more than 20 classic aircraft, including several from Caldwell’s own assortment and others on loan from various private collections.

Notable among Caldwell’s aircraft are several Waco biplanes, originally manufactured from 1920 through the end of the 1940s, which were the best-selling civilian biplanes in the U.S. at the time.

Another standout in the collection is a Stearman PT-17 on loan from Waldo Wright’s Flying Service out of Florida. The 1942 trainer is piloted by its owner, Waldo “Rob” Wright. Wright runs the on-site Waldo Wright Restoration Shop. The shop serves as both a workspace and a living exhibit, allowing visitors the chance to watch the antique revitalization process firsthand.

The collection, along with a restoration shop, a café, and a small library, is housed within a 30,000-square-foot, fully restored 1943 WWII hangar at El Reno Regional Airport.

Int’l Women’s Day Aviation Round-Up

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March is Women’s History Month and March 8 is International Women’s Day.

Here’s how some airports and aviation museums and others marked the day.

There’s a lot you can learn in a quick scroll.

Get you free museum tickets

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Between shutdowns, staff layoffs, and budget cuts, the pandemic has been tough on museums and cultural attractions across the United States.

But that won’t stop more than 1000 museums, zoos, and cultural centers from opening their doors for free on Saturday, September 18 as part of Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day 2021.

Each participating museum will offer free admission to guests who present a museum day ticket downloaded from the Museum Day site. Visitors may request one ticket per email and each ticket provides general admission to the ticket holder and one guest.

In addition to offering savings on admission fees, which can be quite hefty, Museum Day gives guests a chance to revisit a favorite museum or explore a new one.

The event, which was canceled last year due to COVID-19, celebrates the reopening of museums and the return of arts and cultural experiences with this year’s theme of Experience America.

You can search by city, zip code, or state for a museum near you. Here are a few examples of museums you might want to visit with your free Museum Day ticket – or any day.

Flight Path Museum & Learning Center at LAX

The Flight Path Museum and Learning Center is a great aviation and aerospace museum at Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX Flight Path Museum airplane models

Gold Coast Railroad Museum: Miami, FL

The museum houses more than 40 historic rail cars including the Presidential Rail Car ‘Ferdinand Magellan,’ and Florida East Coast Steam Locomotive #153. 

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, NY

The legendary aircraft carrier Intrepid is a National Historic Landmark. See 28 aircraft, the space shuttle Enterprise, and enter Growler, the only guided missile submarine open to the public.

Museum of Flight, Seattle, WA

The Museum of Flight is the world’s largest independent air and space museum. It displays over 160 airplanes and spacecraft on a 23-acre campus. The museum’s six buildings include the original Boeing Aircraft factory.

Museum Monday: Aerospace Medicine at Seattle’s Museum of Flight

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Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day returns on September 18, 2021 and on that day more than 1000 museums, science centers, and gardens around the country will be offering free admission to anyone who shows up with a downloaded Museum Day ticket.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight (where regular admission is usually $25) is on the list this year and we’ve already downloaded our ticket so we can go see the museum’s newest exhibit called Stranger Than Fiction – the Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine.

The exhibit includes dozen of artifacts, including medical kits, airsickness bags, flight suits, and spacesuits. and tells the story of aviation and space adventurers, doctors, and researchers who make it possible for people to fly through the air and off into space.

Below are some of the retro comic book-style images the Museum of Flight is using to help make the exhibit accessible to all. And here is the official Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack, created by artist Leeni Ramadan.

(All photos courtesy Museum of Flight)

Museums are opening across the country

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Are you ready to visit a museum? If so, it’s a good bet you’ll find a museum near you that’s open, or getting to ready to open its doors to the (masked ) public again soon.

Here are some of the museums we’ve got on our list.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight

It was cute when animals from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo got to visit the Museum of Flight. But we were still jealous. Now we’re happy people can visit the museum too.

https://youtu.be/5X3vYQlqNJ8

Can’t make it? Don’t worry. The museum’s collection can be viewed online. In the artifact section, we found this talking GI Joe Astronaut from 1970.
“When his dog tag is pulled, GI Joe narrates his way through a lunar mission, from liftoff to Moon landing to splashdown.”

Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum 

The Mütter Museum is a medical museum with far-ranging collections of anatomical specimens, models, and medical instruments. Einstein’s brain is here. And so is a specimen from John Wilkes Booth’s vertebra.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Memento Mütter, the museum’s online exhibit of more than 60 items from the Museum’s collection, about half of which are not on public display.  If you check it out, be warned that the paper mache eyeball is one of the least alarming objects you’ll see.

Now that the museum has reopened, there’s a new exhibit of photographs by Nikki Johnson, who got to go behind-the-scenes at the museum and create still-life photos of items that intrigued her.

Fashioning Art from Paper at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum

A new exhibit at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY features life-size costumes that look like fabric but are actually made from paper. Beginning in 1994, Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave started creating these incredible paper works. She ended up with four collections ranging from the fashion of Elizabeth I to 20th century Venice and tributes to famous artists like Picasso and Matisse. All four collections are part of this exhibit.

The museum made a video of the ‘unboxing’ of some of the dresses in the exhibit.

Museum Monday: aerospace museum finds

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With the help of Twitter-buddy Isaac Alexander, I spent a good chunk of this Labor Day weekend putting together a list of aerospace museums to keep track of and, perhaps, to feature on Museum Mondays here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

The process took quite a bit longer than it might have because I kept clicking on links at these museum websites and, well, you know how that goes… a half hour later I’d get back to the task at hand.

So for Museum Monday this week, I’ll just share a few of the links that caught my eye.

First up: The Stafford Museum, in Weatherford, Oklahoma.

Named in honor of four-time astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, a post on this museum’s site sent me to a Gizmodo posting of a half-dozen awe-inspiring time lapse videos from space.

Here’s one:

And I can’t even remember now which museum site sent me to this video about jobs in aviation – circa 1947 – but I had to stop and watch the entire thing.

Have you visited a great aviation or space-related museum lately? Share your favorite here and it may be featured on a future edition of Museum Monday.

Museum Monday: 1928 biplane inside Ottawa International Airport

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There are close to 700 aviation and space museums in the country. Each Monday, we explore one of them.

De Havilland Tiger Moth from Vintage Wings Canada

De Havilland Tiger Moth from Vintage Wings Canada

This week we have the story of a fun partnership between Canada’s Ottawa International Airport (YOW) and Vintage Wings of Canada, a local organization that acquires, restores, maintains and flies classic and significant aircraft, with an emphasis on Canadian airplanes.

You can see photos of the all of the museum’s aircraft on its website. To see the planes in person, though, you’ll have to be part of a scheduled group tour or show up at one of the organization’s special summer events.

But as this article (with video) in the Ottawa Sun describes, for a while at least, air passengers will be able to see one of the museum’s treasures in the baggage claim area at Ottawa International Airport.

Last week museum volunteers flew a 1928 WACO Taperwing biplane to the Ottawa Airport, disassembled the plane enough to get it into the terminal, and then put the plane back together in the baggage claim area.

WACO Taperwing 1928 from Vintage Wings Canada

The biplane plane was recently featured in the film, “Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank and is scheduled to be at the YOW airport until mid-September. Volunteers from Vintage Wings will be on-site to tell passengers about the history of the airplane.

1928 WACO Taperwing inside Ottowa Airport

Volunteers reassemble the 1928 WACO Taperwing inside YOW airport

Do you have a favorite aviation museum you’d like others to know about?

Leave a comment here and we’ll try to add the nominated sites to the Museum Monday schedule.

Museum Monday: Museum of Flight, Seattle

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It’s Museum Monday here at StuckatTheAirport.com, so time to take a look at one of the 694 aviation museums around the country.

This week: a quick look at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, which has just kicked off a new exhibit about women in the aerospace industry: Chasing Horizons: Women in Aerospace.

Associated Women Pilots of Boeing Field (1933-1946). Museum of Flight collection.

The exhibit starts off with pioneer French aeronaut Élisabeth Thible, who became the first woman to fly in a balloon in 1784, and continues through aviation’s Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s, World War II, and to today’s fighter pilots, aerobatic pilots, engineers, and astronauts.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to see here. The Museum of Flight is home to a vast collection of more than 150 rare aircraft and space vehicles.

There’s a control tower overlooking the very active Boeing Field and, in the Personal Courage wing, a display of 28 fighter aircraft.  The major attraction, though, is the six-story Great Gallery where there are more than 20 full-size aircraft on display, including this Lockheed M-21 Blackbird.

Lockheed Blackbird at Museum of Flight

See that little red dot to the left of the Blackbird? That’s my favorite museum artifact – an early flying car known as the Taylor Aerocar III:

The museum also has a Concorde on loan from British Airways and the first presidential jet plane, a specially built Boeing 707-120, which had this ‘high-tech’ conference area.

First Air Force One Presidential plane

Seattle’s Museum of Flight is located just south of Seattle and not far from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. So it’s a good option for an activity during a long layover. See the Museum of Flight website for more information about exhibits, special events, hours and admission.

And let us know if you have a favorite aviation museum you’d like us to feature.

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.


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.