Airplanes! We Visit the National Museum of the Air Force

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Davey G. Johnson

Dayton, Ohio, is at least three things. When the automotively inclined think of Dayton, wire wheels come to mind. 1990s college-radio aficionados might think of indie-rock heroes Guided by Voices. But the city’s most important contribution to the world was undoubtedly a couple of bicycle-building brothers with their eyes pointed squarely at the heavens. 113 years ago, the Wright brothers flew a powered airplane on a windy beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, then came home to Dayton to figure out how to fly for real.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has blended with the pasture where the Wrights worked the bugs out of their airplane, and fittingly, it’s home to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, featuring nearly a century’s worth of planes flown by the Army Air Corps, the Army Air Forces, and the United States Air Force, as well as machines utilized by its adversaries. It is four huge hangars full of important and, in many cases, very rare aviation history—it’s the only place in the world where one can lay eyes on the sole surviving XB-70 Valkyrie or walk through the VC-25 that carried John F. Kennedy’s body back to Washington, D.C., from Dallas. We stopped in recently, so we thought we’d share.

Awesome Virtual Museum Tours

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Davey G. Johnson
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Bell P-39 Airacobra

In American service, the mid-engined P-39 Airacobra might be most notable as the first aircraft that Chuck Yeager ever bailed out of. By the time the U.S. entered the war, Bell’s fighter had largely been relegated to training duty. On the Eastern Front, however, the Russians used the P-39 to great effect against the Germans.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Consolidated OA-10 Catalina

Consolidated’s PBY Catalina was without question one of the workhorse machines of the Second World War. Originally designed as a maritime patrol bomber in the 1930s, the Cat served memorably in the search and rescue role, including the salvation of 56 sailors from the ill-fated USS Indianapolis, a daring rescue which ultimately left Lieutenant Adrian Marks’ plane unflyable, as he and his crew landed in high seas and wound up lashing sailors to the Cat’s wings to keep them out of the shark-infested Pacific. The Indianapolis had been torpedoed by a Japanese sub after delivering atomic-bomb components to Tinian, where they would shortly be employed by the Air Force’s 509th Composite Bomb Group. On display here is the USAAF’s version of the Cat, the OA-10.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Bristol Beaufighter

What, pray tell, is a “Beaufighter”? Bristol’s oddly named, twin-engined night fighter was an evolution of its Beaufort torpedo bomber. Early radar sets were big and heavy, requiring a large plane to carry them. Before the P-61 arrived in service, the USAAF flew the Beaufighter in the night-fighting role. The British had already largely replaced it with the de Havilland Mosquito plywood wonder. Decades after Mosquito production ended, Bristol Cars, an associated British concern, built an automobile called the Beaufighter from 1980 through 1993; it was powered by a turbocharged version of Chrysler’s 360-cubic-inch LA-series V-8.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Consolidated B-24 Liberator

Along with the Jeep, the B-24 Liberator stands as the most potent symbol of the Rust Belt’s Arsenal of Democracy. More B-24s were built at Ford’s massive Willow Run complex in Ypsilanti, Michigan, than anywhere else—half of the bomber’s total 18,000-plus production—although the aircraft was designed by Consolidated in California. The B-24D pictured here, however, was assembled at Consolidated’s plant in San Diego, California. It served in North Africa.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Focke-Wulf Fw 190D-9

Germany’s Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was, along with the Messerschmitt Bf 109, one of the Luftwaffe’s two primary single-engined fighters of the Second World War. Initially powered by a 14-cylinder, two-row BMW radial engine, the 190D, or “Dora,” had its nose lengthened and an inverted Junkers V-12 installed. The state of the war by the time the D-9 variant arrived on the scene in 1944 meant that these high-altitude interceptor planes instead spent more time doing ground-attack work and staving off Allied fighters than defending the Reich from British and American bomber raids.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Republic P-47 Thunderbolt

Sure, it wasn’t as svelte as the movie-idol P-51, but Republic’s P-47 Thunderbolt was just as important to the American war effort. Have a look at the forgotten Seversky P-35 and you can see the kernel of an idea that found full expression once Serversky was forced out of the company he founded and the name was changed to Republic aircraft. Seversky’s fellow Russian emigré, Alexander Kartveli, was responsible for the design of both planes. While the P-47’s Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp resides, conventionally, in the nose of the plane, the Thunderbolt’s big turbocharger sits behind the pilot. It served with distinction as an escort fighter, as well as in the ground-attack role.

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Northrop P-61 Black Widow

Northrop’s P-61 Black Widow was initially designed for a British mandate for a long-loiter night-fighter capable of carrying a large and primitive radar set. By the time it entered service, the British had largely replaced their Bristol Beaufighters with the fast, fabulous, and versatile de Havilland Mosquito, leaving the Widow to the Americans. A huge and imposing thing, the P-61 carried four 20-millimeter Hispano cannons and served in all theaters during World War II. The last flying example of the type—an F-15 Reporter reconnaissance variant reconfigured as an air tanker—crashed in 1968 while fighting a wildfire outside Hollister, California.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka

Japan’s Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka (cherry blossom) is certainly one of the uglier weapons ever constructed. A rocket-powered, man-piloted missile, the Ohka was launched from underneath a twin-engined Mitsubishi “Betty” bomber. Its one-way mission was to ram itself into Allied warships. Americans nicknamed it “Baka”—Japanese for “fool.” Perhaps the only redeeming thing about the craft was its terrible success rate.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet

Combine advanced, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time engineering with a desperate madman at the helm of a nation and you get things like the Me 163 Komet. If you’ve ever flown Lufthansa, you may have noticed the safety card discusses “Sauerstoff” masks. Your gut reaction was correct. It literally translates to “sour stuff” in English. The more exotic gases and fuels used by Germany during the war years were also referred to as “stoff.” In fact, search Wikipedia for “list of stoffs,” as there is one. The rocket-flea 163 was powered by a blend of T-stoff (nearly pure hydrogen peroxide) and C-stoff, a blend of hydrazine hydrate and methanol. One did not want to accidentally put C-stoff in the T-stoff tank or vice versa, as the result would be an exploding Komet. Supposedly, one of the little things hit 700 mph. They did not, however, take down many planes. Nazism as a whole was an ignoble failure. The crazy wee Komet? Rather a noble one.

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Messerschmitt Me 262

Much less of a failure was Messerschmitt’s Me 262. It simply arrived too late in the war to make much of a difference. Still, the Nazi jet scared General Carl Andrew “Tooey” Spaatz enough that he worried the planes might bring an end to American daylight bombing raids if the Germans could field enough of them. If the 163 was ultimately just a dead-end interceptor, the 262 was the herald of the modern age, rendering obsolete all that had come before it.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Boeing B-29 “Silverplate” Superfortress

After Colonel Paul Tibbetts’ Enola Gay destroyed Hiroshima with the uranium-gun Little Boy bomb, the atomic warriors of the 509th Composite Bomb Group returned to the skies of Japan on August 9, 1945. Bockscar, flown by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped Fat Man, a plutonium implosion device—a weaponized version of the Gadget detonated in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto less than a month before. The nose art depicts Salt Lake City, the largest metro area in the vicinity of Wendover, Utah, where the Silverplate B-29 crews trained.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Convair B-36 Peacemaker

Behold! The largest freaking bomber ever to take to the sky! A transitional aircraft between the World War II–era B-29/B-50 and the still-serving B-52, the Convair B-36’s career wasn’t particularly long. In fact, the plane only served from 1949 to 1959. Threatened by the jet-powered MiG-15 and incapable of aerial refueling, the Peacemaker was obsolete nearly the minute it entered service. Still, it’s hard not to be astounded by the thing, what with its four turbojets augmenting six 28-cylinder Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major engines driving pusher props. The 36 looks like something from an alternate future that never quite arrived. Bonus! They actually flew around with a working nuclear reactor onboard one of these. Boundless optimism paired with blatant ignorance sometimes results in the most wondrously stupid things. “Let’s put a live nuclear reactor on an airplane! What could go wrong?” Thankfully, nothing did.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Boeing B-47 Stratojet

The last time a Boeing Stratojet flew, it was a short hop from Naval Air Station China Lake at the godforsaken intersection of California’s Inyo, Kern, and San Bernardino Counties to the nearly as desolate town of Atwater in the San Joaquin Valley, home to the former Castle Air Force Base. That was thirty years ago, and it had been 39 years since the B-47’s first flight. America’s first jet bomber never dropped a payload in anger but did serve until 1977 in a reconnaissance role.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Martin B-57 Canberra

The pace of technological development didn’t slow after World War II ended. We traded Hitler for Stalin and threw all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what stuck. One of the most enduring aircraft of the postwar era was the English Electric Canberra, reconstituted for American tastes and license-built by Martin as the B-57. NASA still uses the old birds, 67 years after the Canberra’s first flight.

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Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17

Developed as an evolution of the Korean War–era MiG-15, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 wasn’t available in large enough quantities to contribute measurably to the fighting during that conflict. Instead, it made its mark serving in the Vietnam People’s Air Force. Although it wasn’t as fast as American Phantoms and Thunderchiefs, the MiG was more nimble than the hulking F-4s and F-105s. This particular example was acquired from the Egyptian Air Force and painted to resemble a VPAF plane.

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North American F-100 Super Sabre

The initial plane in the apex-of-cool Century Series, the F-100 Super Sabre was the first American jet fighter capable of breaking the sound barrier in level flight. It also looks a lot like the flying analogue to the mid-engined Formula 1 and Indy cars of the mid-1960s. Fun fact: 889 USAF F-100s were destroyed in accidents. Lockheed Martin is currently under contract for 873 F-35 Lightning IIs, total.

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Republic F-105 Thunderchief

The Republic F-105 Thunderchief was an absolute whopping beast of a fighter. Not in the kids-posting-gym-selfies “beast mode” sense, but rather more like a supersonic ox. No amount of gym time is going to make an ox supersonic. But USAF requirements for a fighter/bomber that could carry a nuke into Eastern Europe at high speed resulted in a gargantuan, single-engined plane designed by Alexander Kartveli, the same man who designed the hulking, single-engined P-47 Thunderbolt during World War II.

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Kaman HH-43 Huskie

The Kaman HH-43 Huskie was an odd duck of a helicopter, what with its intermeshing rotors and long exhaust pipe that dumped behind the tail. It was also a welcome sight to many a downed airman in Vietnam. Besides its own helicopters and rotor blades produced for other aircraft, Kaman came up with the Ovation roundback acoustic guitar.

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Davey G. Johnson
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McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II

If you look closely behind and between this McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II’s exhaust outlets, you can see an arrester hook, despite the fact that it’s an Air Force plane. Most USAF fighters are equipped with tailhooks, though their landing gear isn’t equipped to handle the stress of carrier landings. Instead, they’re meant to grab cables on runways in case of brake failure. The braking force required isn’t handled by hydraulic pistons as it is on carriers, but rather by surplus B-52 brakes or a turbine system that’s somewhat analogous to an automotive torque converter. According to one former F-4 pilot we spoke to who used the system during his days flying in Germany, the deceleration was surprisingly smooth.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Avro VZ-9 Avrocar

After the CF-105 Arrow interceptor program was canceled, Avro Canada was scrambling for contracts to keep itself afloat. One of the more far-fetched designs was the Avrocar, an actual flying saucer that the Canadian government decided it wanted nothing to do with but that the go-go U.S. military took a profound interest in. The idea was for a supersonic VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) fighter. The result was an aviation footnote that could barely get off the ground. The program was stricken in 1961.

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Davey G. Johnson
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X-15, YF-12, XB-70

No big deal, just three of the fastest airplanes ever built. The X-15A-2, with its auxiliary fuel tanks, was the fastest of all the X-15 experimental rocket planes, having reached Mach 6.7. The YF-12A was the link between the CIA’s A-12 Oxcart and Air Force’s SR-71 Blackbird—a plane that needs no introduction to anybody. That XB-70 Valkyrie is the surviving member of the pair constructed. Its sibling, the faster of the two XB-70s, was destroyed during a photo shoot when an F-104 Starfighter collided with its wing, then rolled over the top of the Valkyrie, shearing off its vertical stabilizers. If you’d care to argue that the 1960s were the heyday of American aeronautical development and used these three planes to back up your assertions, we’d be hard-pressed to disagree.

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Davey G. Johnson
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Boeing VC-137

SAM 26000 was the first VC-137C constructed for presidential air travel, the first iteration of what we think of when we think of Air Force One. Its livery was conceived by Raymond Loewy, and it first flew John F. Kennedy a few months after the Loewy-designed Studebaker Avanti went on sale in 1962. President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard SAM 26000 on November 22, 1963, before the modified 707 carried Kennedy’s body back to Washington after that terrible day in Dallas. Less than a month later, Studebaker, in the process of going bust, closed the South Bend factory where the Avanti was built. The car was revived by various others over the years, with the last being built in 2006. SAM 26000 served alongside its replacements, the VC-137 SAM 27000 and the 747-based VC-25 SAM 28000 and 29000, until 1998.

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