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The National Museum of Naval Aviation Fly through America's past. 
By Willie Drye At many museums, you just look at untouchable objects from the past. At the National Museum of Naval Aviation you can step into history for a few moments and come away with a sense of having visited a different place and time. The museum is located at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, just south of the city of Pensacola. The air station proudly bills itself as the "Cradle of Naval Aviation" and since 1914 has trained thousands of flyers for the United States Navy. Those eight decades of flying are represented by the more than 130 vintage aircraft on display in the museum and on the surrounding grounds. The flying machines span the history of naval aviation, from the Navy's first airplane, the A-1 Triad of 1911, to its current front-line, carrier-based fighter, the F/A-18 Hornet. But it's the World War II era that takes the museum's center stage. A mockup of a portion of an aircraft carrier's flight deck is crammed with sea-blue survivors of the Pacific war against Japan. Here, you can get within inches of a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber such as the one flown by former President George Bush. You can examine a Chance-Vought F4U Corsair fighter like the one Marine Lt. Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington flew when he became one of the top aces in the Pacific war. And you can study a Grumman F6F Hellcat, the fighter that became the workhorse of the Pacific fleet and played a major role in clearing the skies of Japanese aircraft. The highlight of your journey into the past, however, will be three life-size dioramas created by the museum's deputy director and curator, Robert Macon. Using mannequins and an amazing collection of period items, Macon has created "walk-in" displays of history that are about as close as you can come to time traveling.
Your next stop is the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier, where mechanics swarm over a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber, getting it ready for a strike against the enemy. You can wander through the interior of the carrier, stopping off at the ship's "geedunk," where crew members bought such wartime luxuries as Glider shaving cream, Lucky Strike cigarettes and Three Musketeers candy bars. The products displayed are genuine, right down to the 1940s-vintage wrappers on the Three Musketeers, which once contained three small candy bars instead of the one large bar sold today. In the ready room, where pilots came for their briefings before flying their missions, you can sit in one of the chairs and imagine what went through the pilots' minds as they waited for the order to man their planes. Life jackets and other flight gear hang on the walls, while black scale-models of warplanes, built in high school shop classes during the war and used by pilots to practice their aircraft identification, dangle from the ceiling. Next you'll find yourself on a Pacific island in 1942, where a U.S. Marine mechanic gets a battered Grumman F4F Wildcat ready for one more flight. You can watch a few minutes of a Flash Gordon movie at the camp's makeshift theater, where movies are projected onto a white sheet, or step up to the bar at the camp's rustic club, which features vintage pinups. You can indulge your curiosities and fantasies—and get some idea of how complicated and demanding it is to fly a military aircraft—by climbing into one of the cockpits used to train Navy flyers. If you need a fix of high-tech entertainment, the museum has a flight simulator that will take you on a combat mission during the Persian Gulf war. You'll take off from an aircraft carrier, launch your missiles against an enemy target, and experience the tricky art of landing the jet fighter on the carrier after your mission. After this ride, you may understand why many Navy pilots say they'd rather take off 100 times from an aircraft carrier than land on it once. The museum also has an IMAX® theater, with a screen that is almost seven stories tall. There's also a restaurant, a re-creation of the Plaque Bar of the Naval Air Station at Cubi Point in the Philippines. At the main entrance visitors are greeted by The Spirit of Naval Aviation, a sculpture featuring Navy flyers from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm—five aviation eras since the flight of that first Triad in 1911.
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Copyright © 2001: Primedia Enthusiast Publications, Inc. and Away.com. All Rights Reserved Photo: National Archives Image: Photo: National Archives | |
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