Ok, I'm an airplane nut. If its got wings, I love it. If it flies in the air, I love it. If it flies into space that's even better, but all it really needs to do is get a few feet off the ground for me to be interested in it.

My work's annual convention this year was in Cincinnati. Now, I'm sure there are lots of things cool to do in Cincinnati (although my bunch was hard pressed to find any), but what interested me in Cincinnati was it is less than an hour away from Dayton, Ohio. "So what?" you might say. Well that means you've never heard of the US Air Force Museum, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the coolest museum on the planet.

I'd heard of this place since I was a little kid. I was an avid plastic model kit builder and many of the kits would mention this museum as their primary source of information. But no matter what I simply couldn't think of an excuse to actually visit the place. Ellen treats airplanes the way our cats treat store-bought toys ("yes, that's pretty I guess. Show me something shiny!"), so just visiting was out. But if my workplace is going to fly me out to a city less than an hour away, well, that's just too good an opportunity to pass up.

So I arranged my flight schedule so I would be leaving very late (7:00 pm-ish) on the Sunday after our convention ended. I would check out of the hotel early, get a cab to the airport, rent a car, head up to the museum, visit, head back, turn the car in and fly out that afternoon.

Eventually Sunday arrived and I shared a cab with other staffers who were leaving that morning to get to the airport. Turns out they weren't the only ones... the line at the ticket counter reached nearly out the door. Chaos reigned as I waved goodbye to my hapless friends and made my way to the car rental counter.

This is the second time I've done this sort of thing. The first time was when our convention was in San Diego and Ellen and I rented a (get this) red Mustang convertible¹. That's a whole different story. This car wasn't anywhere near as glamorous... just a plain Chevy Cavalier.

It's funny driving a rental car for fun in a place you've never been before. It feels like you're cheating, like you've snuck out of the house when your parents were asleep and went to party with your friends. And yet on another level it's almost surreal in its normalcy. You're just driving, and as far as the road is concerned one interstate is pretty much like every other interstate. But I couldn't help get this feeling that I'd just been told by my mother to make sure I'd put on clean underwear, in case I got in an accident.

Cincinnati was just as hot and humid as D.C. that weekend. The kind of sticky heat that makes you feel like you're walking around in the tropical fish section of a pet store. Fortunately while the car didn't have power windows, it did have air conditioning (and cruise control!), so I made the trip in relative comfort.

The museum is about an hour's drive north of the airport, and I timed it just right, arriving less than ten minutes after they'd opened. It actually sits in the middle of an old airfield, so there's a lot of open space around it. The directions on their web site take you all the way around the perimeter before you reach the entrance, then you can park.

There were some outside static aircraft displays on one end of the grounds. Like I said, I love things with wings, and these were big things with wings. Not for the first time I was reminded that it probably wasn't too smart to go to a huge museum complex after spending nine 12-hour + days on my feet, as even this 100-yard walk was definitely a challenge. Highlights: this B-50 (a B-29 variant I'd never seen in person) and this C-131, the aircraft the C-5 replaced³. Not for the first time I was impressed that you could just walk up to the aircraft and really get a good look at them.

Even at 10 AM the heat was beginning to build, so I trudged back to the main buildings to start the real tour of the collections. When you walk out of tropical heat air-conditioned air even smells good. The lobby and IMAX theater looked very new, perhaps the newest part of the complex, and (predictably) you had to walk through the gift shop to get to the collections.

The first "hangar" (they're not really hangars, but they're shaped like them) seems to be the oldest part of the museum, with a very characteristic 60s look to all the exhibits (Arial fonts, pastel colors, etc.). I got the impression from several exhibits this portion was put up around 1962. It's a huge building with what must be a 100 foot (33 meter) ceiling. The walls and the ceiling were all black, and the lighting was for the most part standard incandescent bulbs, giving a very dark impression, almost an antique feel. this picture gives you an idea of what it was like.

Walking along the bare concrete floor you're first taken to the "pioneers" gallery, with many reconstructed and occasionally original aircraft from the beginnings of flight up through the 1930s. Highlights: this complete full-scale barrage balloon (which is kind of saggy today, but in a much more dynamic display) with a Fokker DR. 1 triplane hanging upside-down beside it so it looked like it was trying to shoot the balloon down, several nifty old wind tunnels, and the only existing B-10 Bolo bomber in the world.

The B-10 photo is especially indicative of the way the museum is laid out. Unlike the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) here in D.C., where everything is at least 15 feet away with ropes and guards, you can walk right up to most of the aircraft. When they were roped off I (mostly) respected it, and I made sure never to touch anything at all times. But a lot of times the aircraft weren't roped off at all and you could just look at whatever you wanted as close as you wanted. The lack of crowds and security guards gave an overall impression of a far, far more laid back place than the frenetic NASM.

This first hangar is in two sections, "pioneers" and then "airpower and Korea" (my terms, not theirs). Between the two sections was one of the most puzzling parts of the museum... a holocaust memorial dedicated to survivors local to the Dayton area. Now, I have no problems with a holocaust memorial per-se, and this one was modest and well done, but it did seem a bit out of place in the middle of an air museum.

The second section of the hangar is where the museum really came into its own for me... "airpower and Korea". Walking down a wide, dark hallway on the edge of the hangar I was startled by an enormous wingtip and aileron sticking out over my head, like a big ovoid diving board. It was only later I learned exactly what that was connected to.

This section is crammed with airplanes, something like 70 or 80 in all. Especially in the Korea area, the planes are almost wingtip-to-nose⁴. Highlights: Being able to walk up and stick my head into the landing gear wells of the plane that dropped the second atomic bomb, other aircraft which actually saw combat and had the bullet patches to prove it, hydrogen bomb cases that are as big, intimidating, and ugly as their purpose, the only P-61 I've ever seen outside of a book, and two German airplanes I actually fly in simulation in my IL-2 game (see the right side of the main page).

Two things I think deserve special mention: I stumbled onto a small side exhibit of the remains of a crashed WWII transport recovered from the jungles of the south pacific. Many guys survived, but some were badly injured. Two parties were sent out into the jungle to go get help, leaving the rest behind at the crash site.

It took the two exploration parties weeks to get out of the jungle, and by that time they were so lost they couldn't find their way back. The guys remaining behind wrote a journal in pencil on a wrecked panel of the airplane. The panel, and the crash site, was eventually found in the 1970s, thirty years too late. You could look closely at this panel and see the graphite from the pencil lead, scrabbles in a hand not unlike your own, entries made by people lost in a jungle on the other side of the planet, waiting for rescue that never came.

The other thing was something I'd been looking forward to... this B-36 bomber. Looking at a distance with the plane outside just barely gives you a perspective on how huge it is. When you put it inside a house, the scale sucks down to the point that the airplane literally became part of the scenery. I watched several people bump into it, look up, and nearly fall over when they realized it was an airplane and not a wall. This was the owner of the wingtip I saw on my way in. The 230 foot wingspan, longer than the Wright brother?s first flight, stretched from one side to the other of this enormous building, with only a few feet of clearance. It was completely amazing.

At this point my legs were lead weights with sand in the joints, so I sat down in the "Bob Hope memorial" exhibit (the second, albeit less somber, bizarre exhibit in the museum) for a bit of a rest.

The second, much newer section of the museum was called "modern flight". Built in 1985, it is about half the size of the older gallery, but still just as impressive. Instead of sparse conventional lighting with dark walls, it's a huge, brightly lit white space, albeit with the same concrete floor, filled (mostly) with aircraft from the Vietnam era to the present day. This picture of a BQM-34 "Firebee" gives a good impression of the "feel" of this section.

Highlights:

• Getting to actually touch an SR-71. You can see and feel the seams in the fuel tanks. The thing was suppose to pour fuel from leaks in these tanks while on the ground. Only the heat of mach-3+ flight would cause them to seal.
• Seeing a B-18 Bolo, the aircraft that beat the B-17 out in its initial competition. I'm glad they kept going with the B-17.
• Walking around this B-58 Hustler. Just like my parents said, it is one of the most ridiculous aircraft you'll ever see. Wings are just big enough to hold the engines on, and that's about all the wings are good for.
• Seeing a B-52 mounted on pedestals like some monstrous trophy.
• Getting to peer into the cockpit of an X-15. The X-15 at NASM is hanging from wires, and you can't get anywhere near it. The one at the AFM isn't even roped off.
• Stumbling over the tires of the XB-70, and only then noticing that it was even there. I almost literally fell over, because unlike the B-36 I'd forgot that it was there. A massive, amazing aircraft with six huge afterburning jets all in a row.
• Noticing, not for the first time, that a lot of our early X craft are basically refinements of designs we stole from the Nazis, who were too busy getting bombed to build them.
• Getting to actually feel the leading edge of an F-104 Starfighter wing. I'd always read about how it was so sharp it had to be covered on the ground to prevent injury. It wasn't a razor, but it was a really dull butcher knife. Not fun if you were to back into it.

I had to sit down several times just to keep from collapsing. I was probably a lot like a toddler that's exhausted but too excited to sleep. It was probably a good thing I was alone. I went and saw an IMAX film (nice, but pretty much like every other IMAX film I've seen... good to sit down though), ate at the cafeteria (cheap, decent), toured the whole thing one more time in reverse, then headed for the airport.

I got there at about 5:00, with a scheduled 7:00 pm flight. The terminal was empty, which gave me a smile. I found my gate, collapsed into my chair, cooked up loving-kindness in my head, finished my book, (eventually) got on my flight for home, greeted by my beautiful wife, and given an extra-special gift.

But that... that's a story I'm keeping to myself :).

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1 Something my brother, an almost pathological Ford-hater, has yet to forgive me for. We just call it "the incident"². :)

2 Well, ok, we don't really call it "the incident". It just sounds funnier that way.

3 Yeah, I suck. I only brought one of those dinky little disposable cameras, and hardly any of the pix turned out. But since the AFM has such nifty pictures already there, why not use them?

4 The new section, concentrating on the cold war, should go a long way toward alleviating this problem.