Museum Review - National Museum of the United States Air Force

For last week's DSL meetup, I returned to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB¹ for the first time in 16 years. I've previously reviewed it based on that visit, but that was years after the fact, and I wasn't able to give the sort of detail that I like to. But, in the wake of an incredibly fun meetup (you should come to Iowa next year) I can now review it properly.

This is an incredibly good museum on several levels. First, the collection is unmatched. I don't know of anywhere else you could look at the history of land-based military aviation, from the Wrights to supersonic flight to stealth, entirely with real airplanes. Across the four big hangars, there's an example of almost everything the USAAF/USAF has flown since the 20s, along with many planes stolen from our enemies, and quite a few of the planes themselves have cool stories, ranging from a number that set important records to the Cornfield Bomber. Not to mention the unique planes, like most of the stuff in the R&D Gallery, home of the world's greatest airplane, the XB-70.

The BT-14 "crash"

But it's possible to have a good collection and deploy it badly, like they do at Pima. Fortunately, the museum's presentation is as good as the collection. Signage is plentiful, and they even had some cool braille signs for the visually impaired, which I've never seen at an air museum before. And while it's certainly big enough that I wouldn't criticize it for just having planes and an engine or two, it goes far beyond that. The planes themselves are frequently staged to tell various stories and add visual interest to the gallery beyond "just a bunch of planes". Probably the standout here is the "crashed" BT-14 in the early years gallery, a fun way of pointing to the problems of training new pilots, but there's lots of cases where a few mannequins and a piece of machinery or two subtly illustrate some aspect of aviation that would otherwise be easy to overlook. There's also a fair number of big artifacts (vehicles, radar equipment, and so on) to bring out the ground-based aspects of the Air Force's work. And almost everywhere that isn't one of these has some sort of display, be it a more in-depth explanation of the development and duties of a nearby airplane or a case showing the uniforms of someone important and relevant to the gallery.

They often have former pilots near their airplanes. This gentleman was a Wild Weasel pilot in Vietnam

So, in this case, Dayton manages to fulfill all three possible criteria for a good air museum. It's got a big collection of interesting airplanes, it displays them well, and it also has a lot of good supporting exhibits, which would be worth seeing even if they were separated from the airplanes. I have long recommended Dayton as a place to go if you like airplanes, and the best air museum in the world for geeks.² But after this visit, I think it was even better than that. In terms of museum implementation, it’s probably not quite as good as NASM on the Mall, but it’s surprisingly close, and a much better place to go for people who aren’t into airplanes than I expected. And while it can’t match DC in the quantity of other stuff to do, Dayton also has a lot of other attractions, both aviation and otherwise.

Unfortunately, it was too difficult to destroy that stupid art display

Of course, no museum is completely perfect, and there are a few things I need to warn you about before you go. First, there's a rather hagiographic section on Billy Mitchell, which of course is full of vile lies. Second, at the time of our visit, they had a couple of cars and a motorcycle that had been built by the Air Force for recruiting purposes, sitting right in front of the B-2 and blocking access to the JDAM that I wanted to talk about. But most irritatingly, there was an art display smack in the middle of the main corridor in the R&D section, which blocked the lines of sight I wanted to use in my last section of the tour. It's not that I object to this (or the cars) being in the museum, but they should be well out of the way of anything important, and they simply weren't.

But despite those minor niggles, it's still one of the very best museums I've ever been to, exceeding even the very high expectations I had developed after months of carefully studying the site and its collection for my main tour. You should definitely go.