Keeping Cool at the National Museum of the USAF – Day 1
As mentioned in previous posts, it’s been hot. Too hot to do our ritual of outdoor hikes on some days. But thankfully we have fun local places to get our steps in and keep cool! One great example is the National Museum of the USAF in Dayton, Ohio. The museum is free to the public and is absolutely huge, being composed of four massive hangars filled with aircraft, as well as other flying things.
The museum is so large that it takes two days to explore properly. So we decided to visit to beat the heat for a couple of afternoons, and still be able to keep up with our step count! Learning new things is always fun, and we were raring to go since we had just watched Top Gun: Maverick the day before.
One additional perk of this plan is that Rhonda’s cousin Krista is a curator at the museum, so we’d be able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the museum’s collection of aviation artifacts. Sweet!
On day 1 we arrived when the museum opened knowing that we had a lot of ground to cover. We snagged a guide map and started our tour. The museum layout was in chronological order, each hangar representing different eras in aviation history.
A little-known fact about me is that I used to be an avid player of the World War I aviation board game Dawn Patrol back in high school. And by avid I mean hundreds of hours over the course of three years, hanging out and gaming with my high school friends.
So I was in full-on WWI aviation geek mode when exploring the first hangar, containing The Early Years Gallery.
So many airplanes!
Some of my favorites are the Nieuport 28…
The Sopwith Camel…
The Fokker D. I (of Red Baron fame)…
The Spad XIII…
And the Fokker D. VII.
Still in the same hangar, our path led us to the World War II gallery.
So. Many. Airplanes.
Some of my favorite exhibits include the P-40 Warhawk…
The B-17 Memphis Belle…
And the B-24 Strawberry Bitch…
It was at this point we were picked up by Krista to visit inside the actual Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to see where she did her work as a curator. As she explained, her work involves (among other things) setting up and costuming the display mannequins. So she works with more personal artifacts and their restoration.
We saw many fascinating items donated to the museum over the years, including the leather aviator’s headgear worn by Charles Lindbergh, decades-old space program training gear, and uniform rank insignias from important people. One of the weirdest artifacts was a piece of a “space pancake” donated to the museum by Joe Simonton, who supposedly had a close encounter with aliens.
As the story goes, the aliens had made an emergency landing and telepathically suggested to Mr. Simonton that they needed help. After Mr. Simonton gave them a jug of water, the aliens cooked him pancakes as a reward. Very polite visitors.
Mr. Simonton’s story was never verified, but the composition of the pancake was confirmed as being made of buckwheat. No exotic space ingredients, sadly.
We then went on a more extended walk through the base storage hangars, which contained items of a more mechanical nature not part of the main museum exhibits.
Walking around these hangars, which were packed with old engines, missile housings, aircraft, and other aircraft-related parts reminded me of the closing warehouse scene from the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. The pictures really don’t do what we saw justice.
After wrapping up our time at Krista’s workplace we all went out to lunch at a local Indian restaurant and then returned to the museum.
For the remainder of the day, we explored hangar 2 (Korean War/Southeast Asia War Galleries) and part of hangar 3 (Cold War Gallery). We saw as much as we could, but it was clear that we would have to come back for a second visit!
Here are some choice images from the Korean War/Southeast Asia War Galleries.
Positively polluted with aircraft…
A UH-1P Huey exhibit, illustrating the kind of work Krista does.
The B-26 Invader Dream Girl…
And a B-26K Counter Invader.
This post is getting pretty long, so I am going to conclude Day 1 of our National Museum of the USAF visit here. And I’ve only covered a few of the highlights of the first two hangars!
For Day 2 of our National Museum of the USAF tour we’ll show you Hangar 3 (The Cold War Gallery), Hangar 4 (The Presidential Gallery and Research and Development Gallery), as well as the Missile Gallery, and Space Gallery!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to drop a comment in the comments section below!
