National Museum of the US Air Force - Dayton, OH Review

National Museum of the US Air Force

This museum is located outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio, close to I-75, I-675, and I-70 (see map).

The Air Force museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. The museum is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

The Air Force has a long history, as long as aviation itself, with the Army purchasing Wright flyers soon after the Wright brothers demonstrated the concept of heavier than air flight early in the twentieth century. 

The museum has three large galleries, one devoted to the early years up through WWI and WWII; another devoted to modern flight - post WWII; and a third devoted to Cold War Era flight. There is also an additional gallery that covers missles and space flight which the Air Force has always had a big hand in. I believe each of the large galleries is about 200,000 square feet in size so there is a lot of area covered in airplanes, not to mention skads of placards to read.

The Early Years gallery starts with the original Wright Flyer and goes through the various manufacturers, many of which I never heard of and shows the evolution of the heavier than air fabric covered machines that first showed their worth as a weapon in WWI. Spads, Fokkers, Sopwiths, etc all are displayed.  The Wright Flyer is from 1908, and reading between the lines, nobody thought to maintain any of the early aircraft for posterity, so it's lucky a lot of those old aircraft exist at all.

The WWII gallery covers all the famous fighters and bombers including Bock's Car, the actual B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. It looks brand new, as do most of the well preserved birds.

The Modern Flight gallery shows the early jets like the workhorse F-86 Super Sabre. The F-105 Wild Weasel and the hulking B-52 Stratofortress bomber are also there.  There is just so much to see and you can go back multiple times.

The Cold War gallery covers Vietnam, the Phantom F-4, the F-16, and the Stealth F-117 fighters and B-2 bombers that you saw in the Iraq war as well as the crowd pleasing SR-71 Mach 3 Black Bird.  Many displays throughout the museum show interesting things like the actual H bombs that were carried by our bomber forces during the cold war. Another shows the Berlin Airlift that took place when the Soviets blockaded Berlin in 1961.

There is a great gift shop with tons of books on aviation that will make a non fiction buff drool.

There is a further gallery, located a mile away in which are four presidential aircraft that can be walked through, includiing the Air Force 1 (Boeing 707) used by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. 

If you've been to the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC this beats it by a country mile.