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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE

August 1998
Transportation Museums and Attractions

Aviation Museums

Winging It With Kids at Bay Area Aviation Museums

Almost nothing can drag my husband away from his gardening and fix-it projects on the weekend. But when I mentioned I was going to visit a few of the Bay Area's aviation museums, he gladly set aside his rake and hammer, and came along for the ride.

Such is the appeal of getting close to big flying machines. Over the course of a month, we got nose-to-nose with everything from replicas of some of the earliest winged craft to an actual B-52 bomber that seemed as if it could fill a city block. We climbed into cockpits and toured the bowels of a 1940s flying boat. And we got a quick lesson in the evolution of aviation locally, nationally and internationally, both from the civilian and military perspectives.


A number of aviation museums feature "war birds" from World War II, some of them still in flying condition, while the Travis Air Force Museum displays "nose art"-those paintings of voluptuous women and fierce animals that have graced combat planes in several conflicts. (Frank B. Mormillo/Planes of Fame Air Museum)


Towing along test marketers in the form of our two sons, ages 7 and 8, who rated the institutions for their kid appeal, we launched our mission at the Bay Area's newest showcase for historic planes, the Hiller Aviation Museum, which opened at the San Carlos Airport in early June. Our standard of excellence was an aviation museum we had visited in Southern California a couple of years ago, the Museum of Flying. Located at the Santa Monica Airport, the Museum of Flying offered enough climbable cockpits and other kid-oriented features to keep my boys fascinated for a couple hours, plus plenty of well-presented exhibits both indoors and outside to keep the adults engaged. And when we had our fill of static displays, we could watch the action out on the tarmac, which backs up to the museum and can be viewed from the outdoor exhibit area as well from as a second-floor observation area.

Visitors to the Hiller are greeted with a replica of the gas-filled 1869 Avitor, the first heavier-than-air powered plane to fly, albeit unmanned. (Hiller Aviation Museum)


Compared to its Santa Monica rival, the Hiller falls short in a couple areas: Hands-on activities are somewhat lacking, and the facility is entirely indoors. But this gleaming, hangar-like facility is still well worth the trip. The 53,000-square-foot museum takes the viewer on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of aviation, with a particular focus on the very early days, and especially Northern California's contributions. If you think that modern flight began with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, the Hiller will set you straight with its full-scale replica of the Avitor, a locally built, gas-filled vehicle with rudimentary wings that made aviation history by flying a mile in Millbrae, albeit unmanned, in 1869, three decades before the Wright brothers made headlines.

Other highlights include the 1883 Gull glider, which looks much like today's hang gliders and was used by a Santa Clara University professor to make the first manned, controlled flight (although without power), and a replica of the Curtiss Pusher biplane that set the stage for modern aircraft carriers by taking off and landing from a ship in San Francisco Bay in 1911.

Given the museum's founder and primary benefactor -- Stanley Hiller, whose Peninsula company built helicopters until it was bought out in the 1960s -- it's not surprising that there's a special focus on helicopter-type aircraft. My favorite was the Coleopter, a prototype of a one-person vehicle that could take off vertically, then rotate and cruise horizontally -- I got a kick out of pushing the button that put the contraption through its paces. There's also a 1956 Rotorcycle, a fully collapsible experimental helicopter designed to be unfolded and assembled in under five minutes, and used to rescue downed airmen behind enemy lines.

We left much wiser about the beginnings of flight, but somewhat disappointed that there weren't any cockpits or simulators where the boys could get rid of their pent-up energy by pushing pedals and fooling with steering wheels and dials. We decided to console ourselves at the Burger King a short distance down the road, which, we discovered much to our delight, not only sports an airport motif -- complete with a runway pattern marked in tiles on the floor -- but also an actual army helicopter parked in front courtesy of the Hiller Museum. The cockpit provided a good 10 minutes of hands-on and feet-on entertainment for the kids.

Our next foray took us to the vicinity of the Oakland International Airport, where we inspected the Western Aerospace Museum. By comparison to the well-endowed Hiller, this is a shoestring operation, but the dedication of its corps of volunteer docents and restorers shines through. A couple of combat planes mark the entrance to the museum, which is housed in a vintage hangar at the airport's North Field. Inside we found an eclectic mix of historic aircraft polished to a gleam, including a sister ship to the one that Amelia Earhart flew on her ill-fated quest to circle the globe. There are also a couple of flight simulators, and while we managed to talk our way into them, most of the time they are off-limits to the public.

The highlight of our visit awaited us outside in the back: the Short Solent Mark III flying boat, built in 1946 and, as the name suggests, designed to take off and land in water. This is the one plane you can climb aboard, and it's well worth the couple extra dollars they charge for the privilege. The kids had a blast clambering among the various levels and between the cockpit area and the luxury passenger areas-and sitting in the very seat that Indiana Jones did in one scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." You'll be transported back to the early days of passenger air travel, when the flying boat plied such exotic routes as England to South Africa, with a stop along the Nile -- a trip that took 4.5 days and cost $1,400 one way.

Biplanes ruled the skies from the early 1900s through the mid-1930s, and are alive and well at a number of aviation museums in the Bay Area and around the state. (©1998 Barrie Rokeach)


Stay tuned for the opening later this year of a second branch of the museum at the now-decommissioned Alameda Naval Air Station that eventually will add 145,000 square feet to the current 50,000 square feet of display area. In keeping with its location, the satellite facility will largely focus on military aircraft.This is also the site for a floating museum: the historic USS Hornet, a World War II aircraft carrier that recently opened to the public. Our third outing, this time to the Travis Air Force Museum, elicited groans from my sons -- "Not another museum!" and "You go - I'm staying home." But my husband was jazzed about getting access to a functioning Air Force base, and so we all piled into the van and headed for Fairfield. After getting clearance to enter at the visitors center, we found our way to a virtual aviation graveyard -- more than two dozen military aircraft beached outside the museum proper. While the written explanations were somewhat spotty and docents non-existent, we got a thrill out of running our hands over the metal skins of everything from needle-nosed fighters to mammoth transport planes and the aforementioned B-52 bomber. Alas, we were not there during one of the special events when the museum takes visitors on tours of some of the planes' interiors.

The Solano County sun eventually pushed us inside, where we encountered a few historic military planes, a couple of jet cockpits for the kids to climb in, and a replica of a space capsule that we took turns sitting in. Among the more offbeat offerings is an exhibit of "nose art" -- those paintings of voluptuous women and fierce animals that graced fighter planes in World War II as well as later conflicts -- and a display of missiles and bombs, including one similar to the atomic bomb that crushed Nagasaki.

Three museums in three weeks was all my family could stomach this time around, but now that we're hooked, we're going to make a habit of checking out aviation collections wherever we go. With at least another five museums to see in the Bay Area, plus another dozen or so up and down California, we have our work cut out for us.

- Brenda Kahn

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