Best Aviation and Weaponry Collection

Very cool. My son would love it!

They have a few excellent air shows every year, too, right?

Matt

 

Wright Patterson is just awesome. If you love military aircraft its a place you have to go.

Its one of the few places you can see one of my favorite planes (don't ask me why), the Convair B36 Peacemaker

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The National Museum of the USAF is great and I have been there dozens of times. If you are interested more in weapons, plus aircraft, try Eglin AFB's armament museum near Ft Walton Beach, FL.

http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/

 

I was able to visit this marvelous place last year and it is a national treasure.

 

This year was the 100th anniversary of the end of WW-I at 1100 on 11 November 1918. NMUSAF hosted a WW-I fly-in in October with replica WW-I aircraft, some with original WW-I engines.

 

I would love to go there sometime!

 

The Wright brothers bike shop is a nice side trip, and getting there you get to see Dayton in all its glory

 

I went there last year and I still think that the sexiest airplane in there is the Hawk P-6E.

 

Difficult to argue with that...

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The opposite of the B-24 (above)... UGLY and awkward. Often called the "Box that the B-17 came in"...

 

But they made more B24's than B17's in the war. That might be one factor. It was engineered to be massed produced faster.

 

...and it was faster, but about the same payload.

 

Not as tough as the B-17, though. The German fighter pilots loved them.

 

Life was cheap then. Today we would call the losses horrific.

 

The B-24 was an entirely different airplane that benefitted from newer design technology. The B-17 was a transitional design that held over archaic design elements that were mixed with the then new semi-monocoque design techniques. It was over-designed in many areas in 1935 because Boeing relied on its experience in previous truss designs and the B-17 carried the weight from it. However, that also produced a composite structure and the airplane was hard to kill. The B-24 was all shear web and stiffener style construction and much lighter. It could outrun and out climb the B-17 up to 27,000 feet but that was when the Davis wing quit. It had terrible high altitude flight characteristics and required some wrestling to keep it under control. Engine out situations took four feet on the rudder sometimes and if it was hurt bad, it didn't fly well. But, it was easily produced and performed well in all theaters. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I was not over seas but I was active in flight operations. There were a lot of fatal incidents and one could become used to it and I have been criticized for my detachment sometimes. Even before I went into the service we were assaulted by a constant barrage of fatal crashes all around us from the training fighter bases that surrounded us. If I remember correctly, there were 45,000 fatal incidents in the stateside USAAF from 1942 to 1945. It was a daily occasion.

 

There are so many stories like this that no one ever talks about. I remember hearing about the women test pilots who flew or shuttled p-51's out of Hawthorne. One day one girl went up, flew out over the ocean, and never was heard of again. Just another casualty of the war. Find another person and move on.

 

Bob- Accident rate in 1946 was 144 Class A accidents per 100,000 flight hours. It is now less than two. That is a lot of crashed aircraft and the war was over.

Bob (other Bob)- Those were WASPs that trained at Avenger Field near Sweetwater, TX. There is a WASP museum there, too. My father commanded a DEW Line radar station there from 1955-1957 (Sweetwater AFS).

 

I was in college with an ex-BAR man who went through D-Day and into western Germany. He told me of one winter operation where they had surrounded a village full of German soldiers. The snow was about three feet deep and the Germans where running out of the village on the only way out. My friend said that he laid down his BAR on the snow and fired, mowing down the retreating troops . I asked him if it didn't bother him to kill so many people. His answer. " No, just like shooting clay targets at a carnival." He never mentioned how many of his buddies were killed in the Hurtgen Forest ( Band Of Brothers) shortly after that. He was finally seriously wounded in that operation after fighting on foot through France and some of Germany and receiving 5 Purple Hearts. He was not a hardened killer type, he just did what had to be done at the time and then put it behind him. He had a cigar box full of medals but never said anything about it and played his ukulele when he wasn't studying. There were quite a few guys like him in my freshman class of 1950 and there will never be anything like it again. Army officers, Marines, Navy pilots, Army pilots, Infantrymen, Sailors, etc. They were a breed unto their own.

 

I lived on Wright Patterson as a child. I can't count how many times I rode my bike over to check this place out. Truly amazing!

 

Having been to the AF Museum fairly recently, on a trip through Dayton in July, I went to the "Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Site" instead. Unfortunately, the existing cycle shop is the first one the Wrights used; the larger second shop, where they actually built the Flyer, no longer exists. The general store on the corner, which looks exactly like it did in 1904 (and includes a display of Heinz' "57 Varieties") is priceless.