Today was mainly about seeing the planes.
We got up early from the campsite and hit the road to get a decent amount of time at the museum Steff was very excited to get there as she just loves looking at old, static aircraft.
The US Air Force museum of aviation in Dayton, Ohio is pretty spectacular. It covers aviation, from a military perspective, from the Wright brothers through to the Reaper drones and F22 Raptors and has about 300 planes, missiles, space stuff over 5 huge hangers. We spent 6 hours looking not too hard at the stuff and still didn’t get to it all.
The site was bought by the locals a few years back when the old airfield and USAF airbase was out grown. Now it’s 4000 acres including an active USAF base called Wright Patterson.
There’s way too much to show on here, so I've tried to show the relatively interesting photos. Apologies to all non-interested parties reading
The first monkey. There are a few presidential flying machines in one of the 5 hangers here. This, I think, was Kennedy’s 707
The machine the right had a propeller that went so fast that it created thousands of sonic booms a minute.The barrage of supersonic shockwaves gave the crew and pilot horrible headaches and nausea. Not what you need.
Steve’s legs in a F4 Phantom’s cockpit. It’s so cramped and you can see next to nothing through the screen. Plus, it wouldn’t start
This plane used to take off and land vertically. Taking off was apparently pretty straight forward as it’s already facing the way you want to go, but landing was a bitch. One had to fly it backwards and downwards on to the pylon before taking out the ignition key.
A flying saucer! This was an experimental machine that used a massive fan in the middle of its donut-shaped body to get into the big blue. Apparently it was crap as it ‘hub-capped’ and wobbled all over the place. Shame, because I was led to believe that we’d all be flying around in such machines by now, when I was a kid.
That’s enough planes. On to Chicago.
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