Bumblebees and bombers

Friday, March 18, 2011

TUCSON, AZ – Val was in his glory today as we toured the Pima Air and Space Museum and the famous “bone yard” at the neighbouring Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, located southeast of Tucson. It was a good thing we arrived early-ish, since lots of March break families were in line when we got to the facility.

Air Force veterans were the docents and tour guides at the museum, which made everything more interesting, because they weren’t shy about adding their own experiences from Viet Nam or even the Korean war to bring the static displays to life. We started out by learning all about the Wright brothers and the first flight in 1903. We stood under a replica of the plane, a wooden framework covered in muslin that lifted Wilbur into the air, powered by a tiny engine and guided by subtle shifts of his body weight and levers manipulated by his hands. Humans had been airborne before that, but in hot-air balloons or gliders, not something that generated its own power.

We learned that, because there wasn’t a great deal of US interest in these flying machines in the earliest years, the brothers turned to France as they continued to develop their invention, which explains the French origins of such aircraft terms as ailerons, or fuselage.

The museum covered 100 years of aerospace history, in the largest privately-owned collection of aircraft, and third largest of all collections in the US. It included ridiculous items like the Bumblebee, the smallest aircraft ever to actually fly, up to massive cargo planes and fighter jets. On display were planes seen in movies such as Top Gun with Tom Cruise, Jet Pilot with John Wayne and a tiny jet that was actually flown through a hangar in a James Bond movie, in a time before computer generated imaging was available.

We saw home-made planes made from styrofoam pieces coated in fibreglas, and the fastest jet in the world, the Blackbird, that had to be made with titanium because its incredible speed would heat an aluminum body to the point of melting! The irony of that was that it was built during the Cold War when the only source of titanium was in the USSR, which had to be acquired by undercover US purchasers. We also learned that the US keeps three of these planes in running order because their surveillance capabilities are accurate enough to fill the breach if satellite sources of such information should ever fail.

The bravado of World War II pilots was evident on the sides of planes from that era, marked off with tallies of bombs dropped, and illustrated with pretty girls or monstrous teeth and humorous nicknames. Chris, the guide who took us through that section, was nine years old when the war broke out, and 15 when it ended, and was chief of a ground crew during his 20-year air force career. He reminded the group that many of the flyers were only 18 or 20 when they joined up, and the paintings of pretty girls were as close as they ever got to a normal romantic relationship.
He included many insights like these while pointing out features of the various planes. For example, he said the crew member who drew gunner duty had to curl up into a tiny bubble at the tail of a plane for up to eight hours in a position that was so cramped, he had to be lifted out because he was too stiff to walk normally.

We too were feeling a bit stiff from standing for two hours gawking at all the exhibits, so a quick lunch break was welcome before we headed outside the hangars for the tram tour of the grounds. The veteran who gave this part of the tour knew every quirk and feature of the scores of planes, large and small, set out in rows around the building. They were painted all kinds of colours and had straight wings, swept wings, hinged wings, pointed noses, bulbous noses, gun-mounted noses, tall tails, double tails, triple tails — the variety was incredible.

Our final portion of the visit was to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) area, the bone yard where thousands of retired air craft are parked across a huge expanse of desert, waiting to be cannibalized for parts or refurbished for sale to foreign countries or reactivated for domestic use if needed. They are stripped of their engines and sealed from dust and wind to make this possible. Val remembered a dusty opening scene from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was filmed in this bone yard!