Today, Nov 19th, we took Sherpa (our RV) to get her electrical worked on and we took off to see the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. It opened in May, 1976 with 48 planes and it is one of the world’s largest non-government funded aerospace museums, now with 300 aircraft spread out over 80 acres. There are 4 Hangars, a Space Gallery and the 390th Memorial Museum, and we started in the Spirit of Freedom Hangar and saw the SR-71 Blackbird, a super high altitude spy plane. The first engine designed to operate for longer periods using the afterburner and flight at altitudes over 80,000 ft. The engine weighs approximately 6000 lbs and produces over 30,000 lbs of thrust, for all you fanatic pilots.
Then we took a bus over to the “Boneyard“, the largest storage and preservation facility in the world, where there are over 4000 planes being worked on and restored. We went back to the 309th Memorial Museum “where we saw the B-17G up close and heard stories from some of the crew in videos. They were just kids when they were crews of 10 on this plane, only 18 to 21 years old. We spent 5 hours looking at so many different planes that I am on airplane overload now.