For Anoraks Only: Pima Air Museum

Only 4 miles from our campsite here in Tucson is the third-largest aircraft museum in the USA. We visited it on Saturday 28^th Feb. It’s a well-run outfit using ex-military personnel as guides so an informed opinion is always to hand.

We took the trolley tour where our guide was a retired pilot, with the navy then commercial airlines. This covered the 2½ mile external display area; we wanted to save our legs for the hangers.

Here are some of the exhibits with a story to tell, starting with the West’s longest serving bomber, the B52. It entered service in 1955 and is still operational today and for the foreseeable future although none have been manufactured since 1962. A few weeks ago one was de-mothballed out of the storage area adjacent to the museum to replace one that had crashed. 

This is the Budd RB, or what’s left of it, a transport aircraft from 1943.The US Government feared that aluminium, the basic aircraft building material then and now, might become scarce, so ordered 800 of these planes in stainless steel. Stainless steel is much heavier than aluminium. Aluminium never actually became scarce so only 17 were ever built. It looks rather sad and perhaps should have been turned into something useful like whistling kettles.

Our pilot guide said this one, called the NASA Super Guppy, needed skilful handling and calm conditions. It flew outsized cargo for NASA in the 60’s e.g. parts for the Saturn 5 moon rocket. The whole front end swung open in order to load up these extra-large items.

Now we have a Sikorsky flying crane. Sikorsky is an American manufacturing company even though it sounds Eastern European. The founder, Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev and emigrated. The helicopter was much used in the Vietnam War. It looks like a delicate dragonfly, but could carry around 10 tonnes.

United States Presidents’ official planes go by the title “Air Force One”. This Lockheed Jetstar was sometimes used by President Lyndon B Johnson as the presidential plane. He would refer to it, because of its small size, as “Air Force One-Half”. The plane directly behind, by the way, was JFK’s “Air Force One”. 

The Boeing B29 Superfortress was the most sophisticated and largest bomber of WW2 and carried on in service until 1960. It was the aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several were used after the war as flying TV transmitters, and a modified version was the first aircraft to fly round the world non-stop. Of the 3,970 built only one flies today.

Moving indoors to the fastest jet aircraft ever produced (as opposed to rocket-driven), the SR-71 Blackbird. This was operational from 1966 to 98 and was highly secret for its early life because it was the front line spy plane. You may recall Russia shooting down a US U2 spy plane; this was the follow-on to the U2, a plane that couldn’t be shot down because it could fly faster than any enemy missile or bullet.

It could cruise at over three times the speed of sound (2,200+ mph) and generated so much heat that it expanded 8 inches in length when travelling at top speed. It still holds the record for New York to London, in I hour 55 minutes, one hour quicker than Concord. Across America: Los Angeles to Washington DC in 64 minutes. It’s an odd looking machine; the front end could be a home-made speedboat. Come in S71, your time is up.

But for real speed the rocket planes went even faster. The Bell-X15 reached a record speed of 4,519 mph in October 1967. This still stands. Astronaut Neil Armstrong was one of its pilots in the test programme.

 The world’s smallest aircraft is this Starr Bumble Bee, built by Robert Starr as a private project and first flown in 1988. It had an amazing top speed of 190 mph but only carried 3 gallons of fuel. The wingspan is only 5 ft 6 inches. It wasn’t really meant to fulfil a practical purpose, just to claim the world record of being the smallest. Only one was made.

Finally, one hanger was a memorial to the 390^th Bombing Group in WW2. They were stationed near Framlingham, Suffolk. It was full of personal memorabilia like letters from POW camps. Whereas the museum elsewhere focussed on the machines, this was more a people exercise. An unusual exhibit was the embroidery below done by a POW with time on his hands, using unravelled shoelaces as thread and stitches remembered from his mother’s handicrafts.

The museum had a lot more besides and more than could be absorbed in a single visit but I wouldn’t give in to Jane’s pleas to come a second time.