Douglas DC Series Plane at the Museum of Flying

This afternoon, Martine and I visited the Museum of Flying adjacent to the Santa Monica Airfield. As you can see from the number of cars in the lot, there weren’t many visitors today. Before they moved to the present building on Airport Avenue, they were in much larger quarters on the other side of the airfield. For whatever reason, it seems as if the museum split into parts, with mostly the exhibits relating to Douglas Aircraft moving to the new quarters.

It led me to thinking about how many aircraft and automobile museums are closing down. Many of the aircraft museums depend on flying veterans from the U.S.’s many wars to serve as volunteers. We’ve visited the Palm Springs Aviation Museum; the Pima Air & Space Museum in South Tucson, AZ; the Estrella Warbird Museum in Paso Robles; and Torrance’s Western Museum of Flight. Big or small, they are all fascinating—but I suspect that most of them will be closing their doors once the knowledgeable volunteers start dying out.

World War One Fokker Dr.I Triplane

With all of these museums, once you get tired of looking at the planes, there are usually interesting videos to watch. I saw two of them this afternoon: one on Howard Hughes’s giant “Spruce Goose” seaplane and the other a history of the commercial airplane manufacturing industry focusing on Donald Douglas and William E. Boeing.

Waco Aviation Biplane

I hope to revisit this little museum again. From one year to the next, there is a large scale turnover in the exhibits and videos.