Monday, June 15, 2009
Quonset Air Museum
The Cub Scouts in Pack 12 met at the Quonset Air Museum (www.theqam.org) on Sunday June 14 for a tour.
The museum itself has a lot of hardware to see, but much of it needs a lot of restoration. (Think empty fuselage.) Other aircraft, though, are in great shape and there's almost nothing that's off-limits.
(Click on any of these images to open them up, much larger, in a new window.)
We waited at one side of the building, where many of the better-preserved items are lined up:
The first thing we saw when we walked into the hangar was a jet being readied for the Quonset Air Show in two weeks:
Inside the hangar, my two sons immediately went to the dirtiest thing they could find: a jet's tailpipe:
Outside, a rusty Harrier is destined to be a static mount:
There's an F4 Phantom that's had its engines removed. You can stand up where the engine had been mounted and look right out the forward air intake or the back of the plane!
The kids had no idea why you would need stairs on wheels out on a runway.
"Beware of Blast," indeed:
And if you want to help fix these things I guess they're right there for you to get to work:
Obviously, you can get as close as you want:
They told us this was the camera plane from "Top Gun." Who knows if it's true?
A beautiful slice of sky, seen from behind the F-14:
He had no idea what it was, but he sure liked to look of it:
A lovely day:
The place was great fun, but we didn't get a lot of instruction. That said, I would certainly go back because nowhere but Battleship Cove can I get this close to such machines. I just wish they had the money to fund the kind of work you know they want to do.
The museum itself has a lot of hardware to see, but much of it needs a lot of restoration. (Think empty fuselage.) Other aircraft, though, are in great shape and there's almost nothing that's off-limits.
(Click on any of these images to open them up, much larger, in a new window.)
We waited at one side of the building, where many of the better-preserved items are lined up:
The first thing we saw when we walked into the hangar was a jet being readied for the Quonset Air Show in two weeks:
Inside the hangar, my two sons immediately went to the dirtiest thing they could find: a jet's tailpipe:
Outside, a rusty Harrier is destined to be a static mount:
There's an F4 Phantom that's had its engines removed. You can stand up where the engine had been mounted and look right out the forward air intake or the back of the plane!
The kids had no idea why you would need stairs on wheels out on a runway.
"Beware of Blast," indeed:
And if you want to help fix these things I guess they're right there for you to get to work:
Obviously, you can get as close as you want:
They told us this was the camera plane from "Top Gun." Who knows if it's true?
A beautiful slice of sky, seen from behind the F-14:
He had no idea what it was, but he sure liked to look of it:
A lovely day:
The place was great fun, but we didn't get a lot of instruction. That said, I would certainly go back because nowhere but Battleship Cove can I get this close to such machines. I just wish they had the money to fund the kind of work you know they want to do.
