National Museum of the USAF

We’re back home from taking Tom to college. On the way out, we made a couple of short stops to break up the trip. While we were passing through Dayton, we spent an hour or so at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

They have the most amazing aircraft museum I’ve ever seen. Here are a few pictures we took in the World War II gallery.

The size of the collection is pretty staggering, and their restoration department does amazing work.

They have some incredibly rare planes in their collection. Like this Me 163 (with a V-2 peeking out behind it) …

… and Bockscar, the plane which dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, …

… as well as this trainer for Japanese kamikaze pilots.

And all of that is just one half of one hanger. In addition to that, there are two more hangers, and an outdoors display of cargo planes. And if you manage to see that, then you can get on a shuttle bus to go visit a different part of the airbase where you can see the really unusual stuff like a number of X planes.

We were only able to see that one tiny corner of it because we had to keep moving to get to school on time. I think that it would take a couple of days to see the whole thing. I hope that I can get back to Dayton with enough time to see the rest some day.