NAS, Pensacola, Florida (12-4-12)

We’re not staying in Florida yet, we’re actually staying in Summerdale Alabama, at an Escapee’s park about a half hour from the beach, but we took a day trip to Pensacola to visit the Naval Aviation Museum.

The Museum has two hangars full of airplanes,memorabilia and historical displays.

The NAS (Naval Air Station) in Pensacola is also home to the world famous Blue Angels.  Although we didn’t get to see them practice, I did watch two of them take off and fly around.

 

Inside the museum there were many Blue Angel displays, and interactive exhibits.  There were several cockpits that we could climb into….

This is me in the cockpit of a vintage Blue angel plane.  There were also several flight simulators, but you had to pay extra- anywhere from $5-$20 depending on what you want to experience.  We decided it wasn’t worth it for us.

I admit that I pretty quickly had information overload.  Paul has more of an interest in military information than I do, but this display, part of a larger Vietnam exhibit,  brought back memories! The case is full of MIA-POW bracelets that were sold back in the 1970s.  Each bracelet is engraved with the name of a Vietnam vet who was either a POW, or Missing In Action.  A bracelet would be bought and worn by someone (lots of teenagers bought them) until the soldier came home.  Over 5 million bracelets were sold.

My favorite part of the day was the trolley tour.  Our driver, Dave, is retired military and had a great sense of humor.  As we drove around looking at planes, he not only told us the history and significance of each aircraft, he told us many anecdotal stories about them.  Of course, he also told us that some of the stories may not be true.

This plane is the SNJ Texan, which was flown during World War II.  The story is that before the U.S. entered the war, Canada asked us to sell them these planes, but we felt that politically we needed to maintain a more neutral stance so we refused.  However, soon thereafter, a small fleet of these planes was flown north, close to the Canadian border.  The pilots then took a lunch break, leaving the planes alone- and when they got back, the planes were gone!! Dave said he wasn’t sure if the story is true, but said years ago he gave a tour to a veteran who said he was there when it happened.

When landing on an aircraft carrier, a plane goes from 150 mph to zero in about 2.5 seconds. Its really more of a controlled crash than a landing.  In 1963 the Navy wanted to find out if a C-130, with its 130 foot wingspan, could land on a carrier. They borrowed a plane from the Marines to use as a test, and, off the coast of Massachusetts, were actually successful landing the C-130 on the carrier 21 times, clearing the on deck control tower by only 15 feet.  The Navy concluded that although do-able, it wasn’t practical, so no other C-130 has ever landed on an aircraft carrier.(This story IS true, and this is the actual plane that did the landing)

When this plane first took to the skies in the 1960s, the government received numerous phone calls that told about a UFO that had picked up an airplane and was flying off with it.

We spent most of the day at the museum and didn’t see everything.