I love to read about WWII and all of the planes that fought in the war. So, for my birthday, my dad planned a trip to the National Museum of the US Air Force that’s located at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. It was amazing! If you like planes, you should definitely plan a trip to visit this museum too.
The Dayton Air Force Museum consists of four hangers that you walk through during your stay. Each hanger contains aircraft from a different era of Air Force history and each is packed with planes from that era. Allow around 4 hours to fully experience everything they have to offer. Entry to the museum is free and it is open daily.
When you first arrive at the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum, you are greeted by four statues of F-22 jet fighters. This area, called Memorial Park, remembers those pilots who have gotten the Medal of Valor. Once you enter the museum, there’s a short hallway leading you to the Early Years Gallery. In this area, you will see the Wright Flier, the first plane ever built and lots of WWI planes. This room is dedicated to early military flight.
From here, you will enter the WWII Gallery, which has a lot of cool planes in it, including a B-24. You can stand under the B-24 and look into its bomb bay. These are the actual planes that flew during WWII. One of the planes on display is the Bockscar, which is the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. They also have an OA-10 PBY Catalina, which is a boat scout plane that also works as a torpedo bomber. They also have an A-20 Havoc on display, which has a really cool skeleton design on its nose.
Moving on to the next gallery, you have the Korean War and Southeast Asian/Vietnam War Gallery. In there you have a ginormous plane called the B-52, which was a bomber in the Vietnam War. It’s so much bigger than the other planes in this hanger! In the Korean War Gallery there is an F-86 Sabre next to a Mig-15, which was it’s Russian rival plane. There’s also a piece of B-29 fuselage in the Korean War Gallery that you can walk through.
The next gallery is the Cold War Gallery, which includes a section of the Berlin Wall. There is an SR-71A Blackbird and a F-117A Nighthawk, which were both used by the US during the Cold War. They also have a B-1 and a B-2 bomber, which is a stealth bomber. The F-117 stealth fighter was so stealthy that my dad didn’t even see it when he was standing next to it! There were several cockpits that my brother and I could go into to see what it’s like for a pilot and their rio. They also had a ginormous plane that’s even bigger than the B-52 from the Vietnam War Gallery that’s called the B-36J.
From here you pass through the Missile Gallery, where there are ballistic missiles on display. Then you move on to the Presidential, Space, Global Reach and Research and Development Galleries. In the Presidential Gallery you can see President Kennedy’s Air Force One. There are also many items from various Presidents’ Air Force One that are on display, including china, napkins, and playing cards. In the Space Gallery, there is a Space Shuttle CCT Trainer that you can walk through. Here you can see what the astronauts do in space. They also have the Titan IVB, which is a ginormous rocket that NASA made.
In the Research and Development Gallery they have another version of the SR-71, called the YF-12A, that is underneath the cockpit of the XB-70A Valkyrie. They also have the F-22’s rival plane that some people think should’ve beaten it, called the YF-23A. In the Global Reach Gallery they have another huge plane, called the C-141C.
Outside there’s also an Air Park with a C-17, an EC-135E, an AC-130A and an A-10A fighter plane that they also have inside in the Cold War Gallery. The C-17 was in two Transformers movies, the first and second Iron Man movies and a Superman movie. It has signatures right on it by Robert Downy Jr, Gwenyth Paltrow and John Favreau, from Iron Man.
They show a variety of military films in their IMAX theater and tickets are sold both at the entrance and at the theater. We watched the film about D-Day. It was really cool because it was in 3-D. It showed the exact battle plan of Operation Overlord and talked about how the US, British and Canadian forces stormed the beaches in Normandy, France to free France from Germany’s control.
I loved going to the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum because it had almost every plane I wanted to see inside. I had fun walking through the hangers taking pictures of all of my favorite planes. I would really like to go back one day to see them all again. My top three favorites were the SR-71, the Valkyrie, and the B-29.
If you like planes, you should plan a trip to visit Dayton’s National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
What’s your favorite plane? Let me know in the comments.
