San Diego Air & Space Museum
2010.12.22
The last museum we visited that day was the San Diego Air & Space Museum, again at Balboa Park. The collection is housed in the Ford Building, built to showcase their vehicles for the California Pacific International Exposition in 1935.
Out front there is a Lockheed A-12 Oxcart, a single-seat precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. One of the first displays inside is the Apollo 9 Command Module.
Nearby is a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Something I never realized before is that there was no front windshield, only two small side windows. Talk about flying blind. Once past the entry lobby, the displays are arranged in a more-or-less chronological order showing the history of flight. One of the early planes shown is a replica of a Curtiss biplane originally by Lincoln Beachey and Warren Eaton, nicknamed “Little Looper”. Beachey once flew over the edge of Niagara Falls, barely pulling the plane back up just before hitting the whirlpools and rocks below.
On the left, a replica Fokker E.III monoplane. On the right, Snoopy and the Red Baron, or more specifically, a replica of the Fokker DR.I triplane flown by “Baron” Manfred von Richthofen.
On the left, a Nieuport 28 C-1, a French biplane notable for being the first plane used by American pilots in the war. On the right, a Société des Moteurs Salmson Z-9 water-cooled radial engine from 1918.
Pacific Southwest Airlines, based in San Diego, operated from 1949 to 1988. Their slogan was “The World’s Friendliest Airline” and the planes were painted with a smile on the nose. Below are some of the stewardess uniforms over the years. On the right, a replica Lockheed Vega 5B used in the 2009 movie Amelia. Amelia Earhart flew the plane numerous times, but it was not the plane she flew when she disappeared (that was a Lockheed Model 10 Electra).
In the atrium, the rotors of a Bell AH-1E Cobra attack helicopter slowly rotate. Across the way, a Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina “flying boat”.
On May 10, 1972, a McDonnell Douglas F-4J Phantom II flown by Randy Cunningham and William Driscoll shot down three MiG-17’s, making them the only Navy flying aces of the Vietnam War (they had shot down two more previously). It is not clear to me whether this is the actual aircraft or another painted with the appropriate markings. It is chasing the nearby MiG-17 (actually a Chinese-made Shenyang J-5).
On the left, a replica of the Granville Brothers Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster. In 1932, pilot Jimmy Doolittle flew the original to set a new world landspeed record of 296 mph. On the right, a replica of the Horten Ho 229 “flying wing”, a German WW II prototype jet-powered fighter/bomber. It is often considered the first stealth aircraft, using charcoal dust mixed with sawdust and glue to absorb radar waves. The replica was built in 2008 by Northrop-Grumman engineers for a National Geograpic Channel documentary. Their testing showed a radar cross-section of only 40% of a Messerschmitt BF 109, a standard German fighter of the time.
My camera battery ran out of juice, so I couldn’t photograph the rest of the museum. There were a few other WW II planes, a Blue Angels jet, and a long line to try out various simulators.
Botanical Bldg