California Air Museum pics

Modeling Subjects Aircraft
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Last week in my “Sightings” post, I mentioned seeing some '46’s, a '53, and a flight of F18’s. Here are the pics. I didn’t get a good angle on the '53, so i didn’t try to get one of it.

We went on down to San Diego, and the next day we toured the USS Midway. It was quite impressive, and made me glad I never had to go to sea. We went from the engine room, through the hangar deck, flight deck, to the bridge. You must really have to like who you are bunking with. Everyone is on top of each other. It seems it would be very clastrophobic. A question for anyone who served on a carrier. If you didn’t have an aviation rating, could you go to the hangar or flight deck if the carrier wasn’t doing flight ops? Was there any where to get outside the the ship while underway besides “Vulture’s Roost”? The guides/docents were very knowledgeable, most being carrier people, if not having served on the Midway. Here are the pictures from the ship.

http://photobucket.com/albums/v300/waynebaker/California%202006/USS%20Midway/

From there, we went to Palm Springs, to the Air Museum. They have three hangars for display, a Pacific Hangar, European, and one for their flying B17G. For gate guards, they have an A4, F14. A6E, and an F16 in aggressor markings. In the Pacific hangar, they have anSBD on loan from the Navy. It ditched in Lake Michigan during carrier quals, with a mechanical problem. Museum volunteers spent about 20,000 hours restoring it. They have a Corsair that is marked as an FG1D, but it has the windows behind the canopy like a -1, although they are tinted and hard to see. And the canopy doesn’t look like a D model to me. And my wife noticed that all the sea blue paint did not seem to be the same shade. As with all indoor museums, the big problem was the displays on top of each other, making it hard to get some good pictures. They solved that partly by towing some of the planes out to make room for a program the next day. Very few real European theater a/c. The P40 is a 2 seat model. Here are the pics.

http://photobucket.com/albums/v300/waynebaker/California%202006/Palm%20Springs%20Air%20Museum/

In the last hangar, the B17 was open to tour. Since so many people here seem to be building B17’s, I thought i would shoot it in case the pictures might help someone.

http://photobucket.com/albums/v300/waynebaker/California%202006/B17G%20Walk%20thru/

Hope the pictures are worthwhile.

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Wayne:

Awesome pictures in your photobucket album. You have me itching to go to California.

I’m green with envy.

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Great photos!!! Thanks for sharing[^]

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Very nice photos. Thanks for posting them.

Darwin, O.F. [alien]

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Thanks, guys. I love taking them. And hopfully they are helpful. Feel free to wander through any of the other albums. There are other museums, air shows, some models I’ve built, and some 700 photos of our trip to Alaska last year.

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Some very nice pics. Thanks for sharing.

Regards, Rick

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We have a time share in Palm Springs so we head over to the museum every summer when we are there. I love going through the Miss Angela. My kids are hooked on her as well, they love crawling through the hatch at the nose and walking down through the bomb bay into the radio room and waste gunners positions. They have even let the kids go into the tail gun a couple of times when it was not busy. We ahve been down to the Midway twice for my son’s birthday (he is 9) and we love walking through her. I am building him the Kangani (sp) Midway kit man what a stinker of a kit. Here is a link to the aircraft of the Midway website, it has a list of the planes they have in various stages of restoration. http://www.midwaysaircraft.org/

Steve

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Thanks a bunch Wayne, as always, you’re thinking of the hobby & fellow modelers… Good pics

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Ed, thanks for the kind words.

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Yer welcome Wayne [:D] You are very talented with that camera of yours especially from a modeler’s perspective[^]

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Nice pictures. The Corsair appears to have been modified for a seat behind the pilot. The rear windows were added so the rear seat passenger could see something. There are a few Corsairs around with that type of modification. I’ve seen one at another museum.

The aircraft of the Midway site is interesting. It’s cool that they are restoring an SBD-1 and an SBD-2. I didn’t know that any survived.

I grew up in the Los Angeles area. What was 10X better than Disneyland was going to the Chino airport. The Planes of Fame is the biggest warbird collection there, but there is also the Yankee Air Force collection, and a couple of places that restore aircraft. When I was a kid, one of the restoration places had six early B-26s with the pre June 1942 insignia. They were able to piece together enough parts to get one flying. It ended up in Kermit Weeks collection. Another time they were restoring a Japanese Tony. I have no idea what happened to that.

They were rigging the Huey used in one of the Rambo movies one time I was there. The guy working on it was not impressed with the Hollywood people and he didn’t like the idea that his work was going to be blown up, but it was a paying customer, so he wasn’t complaining.

The Yankee Air Force guy doesn’t fly most of his aircraft, but restores them to flying condition as accurately as possible. He had some stuff unrestored in one of his hangers. All I can remember was two M3 Grant tanks he had recovered from New Guinea.

One of these days I’m going to get back to LA. Chino is on my short list of “must see” places.

Bill