Every winter, since it's too cold for top-down driving, the
Indy Miata Club takes a road trip to a museum. This year, we decided to visit the
United States Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. The pilot and navigator were both asleep at the switch on this trip, but, after a couple of wrong turns, we managed to get to the museum. The museum has the largest collection of military aircraft in the world and has planes from the early Wright Flyer up to the YF-22 Advanced Technical Fighter. The main museum is three hangars absolutely packed with planes, along with a missile silo mock-up and an in-house IMAX theater. There is also an auxiliary featuring retired Air Force One planes and another hangar with research and development craft like the XB-70.
We just barely had time to tour the three main hangars and watch the IMAX movie and we were there all day. I'm looking forward to a return trip to see the Air Force One planes as well as the R&D hangar. I had been to the museum before, but it had been several years and it had grown a lot
Photography in the museum is permitted, but it certainly is an adventure. The hangars, as you might guess, are very large and the main lighting is spotlights from the ceiling. The makes for relatively bright spots on some areas of the aircraft surrounded by darkness that pretty much scoffs at your flash. It seems like the only way to get good shots of the planes would be to lug a tripod, but that seems like quite a project as well. At any rate, this gallery turned into pretty much of a Photoshop exercise.
