Daily Archives: February 27, 2010
Planes, planes, and more planes…
Our friends, Al and Adrienne, picked up as about 10am and we headed over to the Pima Air and Space Museum.
Arriving at the museum, we found that the landscaping followed some of the planes inside.
First we have the Fishhook Barrel Cactus.
Next we have Saguaro Cactus.
And then, of course, the Stealth Cactus!
I guess you had to be there.
This is a BD-5J MicroJet, the world’s smallest jet plane. And it was a kit! 
Another kit, Burt Rutan’s Long EZ.
The Starr Bumble Bee, the world’s smallest plane.
The McCullough Super J-2 Gyrocopter
The HoppiCopter. I’d really like one of these.
It’s a big leap to the SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane in the world.
The A-10 Warthog ground attack plane.
A Beechcraft Bonanza. My uncle used to have one of these.
The Grumman F7F TigerCat.
The B-52. This one is one of 2 configured to carry the X-15 aloft.
This is the Douglas MB-1 Genie air to air missile. And it contained a NUCLEAR! warhead. It was to be launched into the middle of Russian bomber formations and take them all out at once. Jan’s father used to work on these when he was in the Air Force. It’s amazing how small they can make an atomic bomb.
This is B-57 Canberra bomber. I used to work on these. I was amazed to find that it had BUICK! jet engines in it. Who knew Buick even made jet engines.
The Convair B-58 Hustler, American’s first supersonic bomber.
The Cessna T-37 jet trainer. I also used to work on these.
The RA-5C Vigilante. In its original configuration as the the Navy A-5 bomber, it had a novel way of dropping its nuclear bomb load. It spit it out the tail! So many jokes, so little time.
NASA’s Super Guppy. It’s amazing that this thing could fly.
The Convair B-36 nuclear bomber. It had 10 engines, 6 prop engines and 4 jet engines!
At this point we took a break and went down the road to a great little Mexican place called Poco and Mom’s. And the food was great. My Green Chili Chicken Enchiladas was the best I’ve ever had.
Coming back to the museum, we began touring some of the displays. This is the Altair 8800 computer, probably the first practical home computer. It was a kit and was my first computer.
This is a photograph of Grace Hopper’s logbook showing the first computer ‘bug’. It was a moth that got caught in a relay, and is the origin of the term ‘computer bug’. This was from the time when computers filled whole buildings.
This is a Grumman F-4U Corsair of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep” fame.
This is a German V1 ‘Buzz Bomb”.
The ‘Columbus’, a updated version of the Grumman J2F-2 Duck.
After a great time at the museum, we headed back to the park, passing Davis-Monthan AFB, America’s aircraft boneyard. Thousands of aircraft are mothballed here.
This satellite photo shows just a small portion of the planes stored there.
On the way home, we stopped by Fry’s Supermarket to pick up some groceries. Fry’s is Kroger’s here in Arizona.
This is our last full day here in Tucson. Tomorrow we’re heading over to Gila Bend for a few days before moving on to Yuma.
More tomorrow…
