On Tuesday of last week we visited the Museum of Aviation at Robbins AFB. We went with several other full time families who are staying in the same campground as us. I was really interested in this trip because I thought it sounded pretty interesting and cool. Right when we pulled up I already had my hopes pretty high, and I was not disappointed. They had so many aircraft that four giant hangers couldn’t hold all of them, so the really large ones were left outside.
When we first arrived we entered the main museum building. There weren’t many aircraft in this building because most of it was signs and displays, although they did have a few, such as the F15 right in the middle of the foyer. They had a very large area dedicated to the American volunteers in the Chinese Air Force during WW2, the Flying Tigers. In fact, the majority of their displays were about WW2 even though most of the aircraft they had were much more recent. The museum itself wasn’t all that interesting to me, so we left that part fairly quickly.
I found the second building we went into much more interesting because almost every single inch of space available was filled by aircraft. There were also a few helicopters, some drones, and even a fire truck! This hanger was fairly small, so most of the planes weren’t that large, but they were still really cool, and every single one had a sign about it with all sorts of information, even how much it cost to make. Because the hanger was so small there weren’t that many planes to see, so we finished it quite quickly and went on our way to the second, much larger hanger.
The second hanger was much larger and held fewer planes, but most were much larger than everything we had seen so far. They had three planes that I knew, a U-2, a SR-71 Blackbird, and the main body of a C-130. There was also a couple drones and an extremely large transport helicopter, the Sikorsky MH-53. I was extremely interested in the U-2, which was a Cold War era spy plane. It was incredibly top secret, and was the plane that captured pictures of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The entire idea of the plane was that it was too high and too fast for anything to hit it, so it had almost no armor and no defenses of any kind. It flew so high that pilots had to wear a space suit to even get up to normal cruising altitude. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work, and a few pilots were shot down. Despite that is is still in service, although it is likely going to be replaced soon by unmanned aircraft. That was definitely the highlight of the trip for me, although it was all very fun.
Unfortunately most of the fourth hanger was closed, so after a quick look around we headed back to the first building to check out the gift shop before we left. I didn’t see anything of notice in the gift shop, but I was interested in the VR simulator they had. Surprisingly they didn’t have any plane flying options, but I still enjoyed it. Before we left we drove around to see all of the planes that were too large to fit in a hanger. There were some weird and interesting designs and shapes, almost all of which I did not recognize, but I still thought they were pretty cool. We finished our tour and drove out the gate, much smarter for the experience.
