Fun times!!!

Took a trip down to Fort Worth yesterday to meet up with an old friend and take in the Vintage Flying Museum (he volunteers there).

If you’re expecting the ‘normal’ museum experience, this one isn’t for you. It is a FLYING museum where the birds do actually fly! So they are usually working on at least some of them, as they take a bunch of maintenance! All done by volunteers (averaging about 5000 hours per airplane per year).

Without further ado- Pictures…

Straight stick A-26, veteran of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.

Yak trainer.

Like I said, WORKING hangar… The A-26A in the back is undergoing an Annual inspection, and it is the ONLY flyable 26A in the world. The other five are in museums.

C-47 getting a jug changed. It has to be up for next weekend, where it will be dropping jumpers.

Beautiful N2N Stearman, former Navy trainer.

This one is really interesting- The last aircraft Jackie Cochran owned and flew. It is being restored and will be flown around the country by the 99s (Women pilots group started in 1929) promoting women in aviation.

There will be a few more pictures tomorrow! And we went down to the Stockyards for lunch at Cooper’s BBQ, so a good day all around.

Comments

Fun times!!! — 17 Comments

  1. The other aviation museum in Ft. Worth that’s worth a trip is this one:
    https://www.fortworthaviationmuseum.com/

    Lots of FAC aircraft, but also an F-8 that was painted in two different squadrons’ colors (one on each side) to reflect the history of the aircraft – IIRC, two of the people working on the restoration flew that particular aircraft and hence the two squadrons’ paint scheme.
    And they have a prototype of the aborted A-12 flying wing …

  2. Nylon- You’re welcome!

    ST- Thanks!

    Tom- Yes, that one is good too! And the F-8 is ‘funny’…:-)

  3. The Beech was at the A&P school at Tarrant County College and the restoration was being overseen by one of their instructors.

  4. There is a lot of .50 caliber guns sticking out of the nose of that aircraft.
    This bible verse springs to mind, “It is better to give, than to receive.”

    Very neat.

  5. If you ever get down to Tucson, there’s a huuuuuuuuge aircraft museum (inside, and out in the sun). And if you’re there, I recommend the Titan II Missile Museum down the road at Sahuarita (https://titanmissilemuseum.org/) I spent time underground there, back int the early ’70s.

  6. That is awesome! I’ll have to see if I can manage a trip there. Would love to take some pictures of those planes.

  7. Sounds like a great day, old warbirds are awesome.

    Convenient segue, but they were having a fly in at Marblehead, and we got to see a B17 and B25 on our charter to the Islands. Too damned cool to share the sky with those beasts. Told the pilot to chick to pretend she was driving a Messerschmitt and she laughed.

  8. All- Thanks for the comments! Heath at least you didn’t say Fokker… LOL

    Posted from my iPhone.

  9. Thanks for spelling “Hangar” correctly… one of my pet peeves!
    So much or our aviation nomenclature is French:
    Fuselage, pitot, reservoir, empennage, nacelle, etc..
    And the damned French build the best helicopters flying today too, damnit.

  10. I did a walk (crawl) through of Fifi at a long ago air show. The pilot/guide had been a flight engineer with the first B-29 units deployed … to India. Yes, they got to “fly The Hump” in an under-powered, over-loaded, cutting edge bomber. They lost more planes to engine failure than enemy fire.
    When I took a photo of the bomb sight he fixed me with a look an said “If you had done that in 1944 I’d have pulled my .45 and shot you.” Puts things in perspective.