Air-Minded: Air Museum Update
I’m in … I’ll do my best to make it work, but will it still be fun? That remains to be seen. It’s a good thing I love old planes and learning new things, is all I have to say for now.
Air-Minded: Air Force Museum Photoblog
Well, I call it the Air Force Museum (and so does everybody else, including the people who work there), but in reality it’s the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, located at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. And it’s one of the holy grails of the air museum world. I had an opportunity to visit in the early 1980s, when I flew […]
Air-Minded: Big Jets, Little Trams, Tall Tales
Pima Air & Space Museum’s fleet of Boeing jetliners continues to grow. Thanks to Cathay Pacific and Boeing, PASM now has a 777. The aircraft, line number WA001 (the first 777 built), flew non-stop from Cathay Pacific’s home airport in Hong Kong to Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona, landing around 11 AM Tuesday morning. After defueling, […]
Air-Minded: PASM Photoblog XIV
I haven’t posted a Pima Air & Space Museum photoblog lately, so I have some catching up to do. There’s no theme to this one, just a lot of this and that. I’ll start with the obligatory selfie and some head-on shots of interesting aircraft: PASM recently added two new outdoor exhibits, a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor […]
Air-Minded: Hijinks & One-Upmanship
Another phrase for highjinks and one-upmanship is esprit de corps. And where would we be without it?
Air-Minded: Grand Theft Airplane
Last night an airport employee commandeered a Horizon Air Q400 twin-turboprop airliner at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He got it started, taxied to a runway, took off, and flew around Puget Sound before crashing on an island (he died in the crash, of course). He was followed by a pair of F-15s that had been scrambled […]
Air-Minded: IL-2 Restoration Photoblog
Work continues on Pima Air & Space Museum’s IL-2 Shturmovik. The fuselage is largely finished, the engine is in, the wings have been fabricated from original blueprints and are awaiting installation, and the propeller, damaged when the Shturmovik’s pilot crash-landed on a frozen lake near the Russian village of Zamejie on January 28, 1944, is being hammered […]
Air-Minded: Son of Non-Starter (Updated 7/25/18)
See my earlier speculations on the possibility of new F-15s for the USAF: The Non-Starter Option? Non-Starter Option Revisited The first post addressed three “legacy” fighter aircraft still in production for overseas customers (F/A-18, F-16, and F-15), and wondered if the US military might be talked into extending the lives of its own fleets by buying new ones. […]