Category Archives: Travel

So, you’ve scored a window seat and you’re heading east from Los Angeles (LAX) to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW). It’s a nice day, good flying weather.

You’re trapped in the middle of a group of fifty or more French tourists who apparently don’t speak a word of English. The only French you know you learned from Pepe le Pew, so there won’t be any scintillating conversations with the two pre-teens that you’re sharing Row Eighteen with.

You’re reading “Feed” by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) and while it’s really great, reading it for three straight hours will cause your head to explode and flying shards of your skull may injure innocent bystanders. We don’t want that. (Well, Seanan might want that, but she’s different. She’s allowed.)

“So what’s that out the window?” you ask, knowing that I take a LOT of pictures.

First, you notice a honkin’ big wing right outside your window. This is good for flying, but not so good for sightseeing and taking pictures. Out over the ocean, you can see the coastal marine layer stretching off to infinity, with Catalina Island popping up through it. Once you climb out of the soup you can see that the coastal clouds come inland almost to I-15.

The Salton Sea is a pretty hard landmark to miss.

Here there be solar power farms! Big and getting bigger every day.

The Colorado River is a strip of green life and farms in a huge stretch of rock and sand.

Occasionally you’ll see a reservoir in what looks like the middle of nowhere. Rest assured, there’s a city nearby — in this case Phoenix, off on the horizon.

Over Arizona and New Mexico we start dodging some thunderstorms.

Over west Texas it gets really, really flat, with occasional circular irrigation fields showing up.

Towns and airports wander by. I think this one might be St Johns, but I would have to check a sectional to be sure.

About the time the engines throttle back and you start your descent from 39,000 feet, the circular irrigation fields are common. What I don’t understand is why some of them only cover a “slice” of the “pie” instead of the whole thing.

And then you’re in DFW, trying desperately to get from your arrival gate to your departure gate (which is two area codes away) and get this thing typed up on the iPhone and iPad and posted before the flight crew tells me to shut down.

Oh, look, MY BAG! It’s on the same plane as I am. That’s a good sign!

Posting & shutting down, no time to proofread. Don’t want to “do a Baldwin”! (How many typos slipped through?)

Son of a… Just got to Virginia Beach and realized that this didn’t post. I really did hit “Publish” at 18:11 on the plane sitting at the gate at DFW, but I guess I shut down the iPad too quickly. Oh, well. It’s still Saturday in Los Angeles.

It’s the worst kept secret on the planet that I’m a little bit ga-ga about airplanes, especially “warbirds”, as old military planes are known. Airshows, flying demonstration, air museums – I love em!

When visiting Virginia three weeks ago for my niece’s graduation, The Long-Suffering Sister-In-Law was wonderful enough to take Ronnie and I out to an aviation museum she had found locally. She thought that I might find it a neat place. I found it to be a fantastic place. The Military Aviation Museum has five hangers full of restored planes from WWI and WWII, and almost all of them are in airworthy condition!

The planes were amazing, the docents were all knowledgeable and friendly, and the work they’re doing there to continue to find & restore planes was just a joy to see.

Here are pictures I took showing maybe a third of the planes we saw:

WWII Navy Hanger

WWII Army & British hanger, with B-25J

 Junkers JU-52 German transport

WWI German Fokker Dr.I replica triplane

WWII German Focke Wulf 190 “Dora” fighter

NAF N3N “Canary” seaplane

AD-4 “Skyraider”

TMB-3E “Avenger”

N2S-3 Stearman trainer

PBY-5A “Catalina” bomber & sea plane (you can see it in full at the back of the very first picture above)

WMF-5 Waco Classic (they’ve started making these again with modern avionics and so on, I hear they’re extremely tasty & shiny, should anyone be wondering what to get me for my next birthday…)

 P-51D “Mustang”, probably my favorite plane in the universe. (What I said above about the Waco? Well, they’re not making any more of these at all, but I’ll still take one if you don’t have a Waco to give me!)

Supermarine Spitfire Mk IXe

Their B-17 “Flying Fortress” is undergoing restoration.

FG-1D “Corsair” – think “Black Sheep Squadron”

There were so many other planes where I either didn’t get a good picture or where the plane was off to the side in the repair hanger where we could see it from a distance but not get up close – they have a British de Havilland Mosquito bomber that they’re restoring!!

We got to spend a few hours here – I could go back again and again and spend days there.

They have grass airstrip out behind the hangers where they have airshows – I would get my pilot’s license current again just for the chance to fly into there.

They have airshows at their airstrip and museum and they fly their aircraft to other airshows – I would take a job on the East Coast just to go to airshows and see these planes fly.

Fast forward to this week…

I’m a proud member of AOPA, the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association. One of my member benefits is a daily e-mail of news about aviation. On Thursday, the lead story was this, from the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot: “Virginia Beach Museum Owner Selling Plane Collection”.

The planes are being sold and the museum is being shut down. The man who built the collection and owned it all, Gerald Yagen, financed his passion for warbirds with his ownership of a series of trade schools, which are now being acquired by another company. Two of the planes have already been sold (the B-17 and the Focke Wulf 190) while other groups and individuals are looking at all of the other planes.

This is terrible, sad news. I’m glad that I got a chance to see the museum and all of the planes together, but it’s really a tragedy that others won’t be able to see them that way and we won’t be able to go back again the next time we’re in Virginia.

Enjoy the pictures and if you’re in the Mid-Atlantic states, maybe plan a trip quickly to Virginia Beach to see the museum while it’s still open. If you miss that opportunity, watch for the individual planes at an airshow or in another museum near you.