Today's highlight was a visit to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which is located at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton. We arrived at 10 a.m. and left at 5 p.m.--and still didn't see everything. After we spent almost two hours in the hall devoted to the planes of the early 1900s, we realized we were going to miss a lot of interesting aircraft if we didn't speed up a bit.
We enjoyed walking through four presidential aircraft (Air Force Ones). We saw the spot on Kennedy's plane that was modified to hold his coffin after his assassination in Dallas. On a brighter note, we enjoyed see that the museum has planes designed by Northrop Grumman, the company that sends Ken his pension check each month. That includes two airplanes with stealth technology--Tacit Blue, built to prove out the technology, and the B-2, the first operational stealth bomber. A new display, opening just last month, is a Northrop unmanned air vehicle that has flown combat missions. This RQ-4A Global Hawk flew more than 4,800 hours and provided hundreds of thousands of images in support of U.S. forces around the world.
Us with one of the Northrop products--the YF-23 fighter.
The museum has an IMAX theater that was showing three different movies at various times during the day. We saw a show on a fighter pilot's experience with what the Air Force calls Red Flag--the training program in which pilots get accustomed to combat by engaging in mock combat against a specially-trained fighter squadron. Ken's son Jeff pointed out the Red Flag unit to us when we visited him in his office on Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. There were some great in-flight shots from inside the cockpit during the mock combat flights.
Tonight we had a final campfire before the storm strikes. Wait--actually the rain did start, but it was a gentle shower, so we just got out the umbrella and rain jacket and waited the brief shower out. Meanwhile we did some laundry, including Sweetie's beds, so we can start off fresh tomorrow.
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