I am on a long overnight right now in Hartford, CT and decided to kill a few hours at the New England Air Museum. I went by myself. None of the other crew felt like going.
It is mainly a history museum and is chocked with interesting displays. None of them have the “awe factor” of the Washington Air and Space Museum or of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (I have been to both). But for just raw reading and history, it was a solidly good time.
It is always humbling for me to go into these museums. I take a lot of personal pride in my involvement with aviation, but some of these pioneers’ accomplishments make me feel so small and insignificant. This museum is filled with stories of aviation pioneers, both military and civilian. There were Purple Hearts on display and Distinguished Flying Crosses. There was an item built by Igor Sikorsky that was a test bed to evaluate helicopter aerodynamics. It consisted of an engine turning a rotor and it used half of a car differential for the power transfer. It consisted of some crude gauges to measure lift and torque. It was a crude device, but by the standards of the time when the word “helicopter” wasn’t even known yet, its impressive, to say the least. There were air race airplanes (Gee Bee and some others) in there which had won the coveted Thompson Trophy.
Then on the mechanical side, there were multiple airplanes (B29, F6 Hellcat, and a huge flying boat, I don’t recall the model) that were fully restored from varying degrees of crap. They included photos of the original condition of these aircraft. The Hellcat had been dumped in California somewhere and was stripped of everything and sat upside down on blocks for decades. The B29 was decommissioned and was sent to be used as target practice by the service. That plan was thwarted and the airplane was acquired by the museum, disassembled, and trucked in. It was reassembled, buffed up a bit, and sat outside on display for some 20 years, during which time the center was hit by a tornado. There is a photograph of the aftermath showing the carnage of aircraft flipped every which way. However, amongst the heaping wreckage of it neighbors, proudly stood a B29, relatively undamaged, a testament to how tough this airplane is. It was then decided to do a full restoration on it, build it a new hangar, which is where it sits today. The manpower put into this thing is mind blowing.
Then to look at some of these engines over the years, 36 cylinder, multi thousand horsepower engines turning huge propellers like on the F4U Corsair is amazing.
There was also the Bunce-Curtis Pusher. A 17 year old kid built this airplane and flew it. In 1912! That would be impressive in 2008, never mind 9 years after the airplane was invented!
The museum was worth the visit. If you are ever in Hartford, CT, check it out.
I sometimes feel like through all my struggles with aviation, furlough news, hotel rooms, check rides, etc that this is just another job. And the everyday doingness of it is basically a job. However, this industry is so full of rich history in the relatively short 105 years since the first airplane flew. Reading about the booming commercial aviation industry in the 50s and beyond with the DC-3, then Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, etc, makes me wonder if my relatively trivial involvement with aviation has any meaning in the scheme of the story. I sometimes wonder in 80 years when I’ve long since made my last landing, if young and eager kids will walk through the museums and read about the rise and fall of the regional airlines, the next big boom in the aviation industry, our own pioneers and record setters, and the next BIG THING! (whatever that turns out to be, perhaps only 20/20 hindsight will reveal it). Will they walk through the halls of museums gawking at our trail of contemporary flying machines?
For now, its back up there tomorrow morning, where history was made and where the next chapter of the story is being written right now!