The Palm Springs Air Museum in Palm Springs, California has 70 vintage aircraft from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and a Stealth Bomber used in Iraq.
My visit sparked a resurgence of memories.
There is a certain beauty to most of the aircraft particularly the B-17 bomber where for a small fee you can enter the interior. It is an enormous aircraft with monstrous sized tires and four engines. It could reach altitudes of 35,000 feet and was not pressurized and frostbite was a possibility. And where did the crew poop? You’d be surprised!
Perhaps the Stealth Bomber will be your favourite. Sleek and very deadly with laser guided bombs. You might be interested in the 3 Soviet Migs. I recall in in the “old communist Yugoslavia” in Slovenia I was taking a morning walk at 7 a.m. when I heard an enormous sonic boom bang that scared the ** out of me. I was buzzed by a MIG the dirty capitalist bastard that I was. I was also delightfully buzzed twice by a Douglas F-4c Phantom in 1963 while a young lad fishing with my friends on Lake Champlain in Vermont. We waved like happy maniacs and I am sure the pilots broke all rules by buzzing us again giving a farewell wing wave and heading off to the USAF base in Plattsburg, New York. What a memory!
My father was a Royal Canadian Air Force radio operator in the Battle of Britain on aircraft flying submarine patrols over the English Channel. Fortunately for him and me he was quickly transferred to Summerside, Prince Edward Island to train radio operators. I have a binder with his war memories and there are many pictures of fighter pilots and as he remarked most of them died in combat. So while there is an aspect of beauty (at least to me but certainly not to everybody) to fighter jets and bombers but lest one not forget they are instruments of death.
The goal of the Palm Springs Air Museum is to preserve, educate and honour and they certainly deliver and perhaps like me a visit may bring back memories so many I can’t recount all of them here.
There are six “Warbird Rides” on the weekends including one on a P-51 Mustang.
For further details www.PalmSpringsAirMuseum.org
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