Into the Wild Blue Yonder

We visited the March Air Field Museum today which is just five minutes from home. I drive past it once a week and have been wanting to stop there since it looks like they’ve add to their collection since the last time I was there a few years ago. I wanted to photograph some of the planes and today we are having some afternoon thunderstorms so it seemed like a great time to go. When we got there, the sun was still quite intense but cloud cover eventually moved in. They have a pretty good collection of planes, mostly outside - it’s amazing how much damage the sun and weather can do to the paint on these things.

Everyone there was extremely nice, one even took us into the restoration shop to see the machining and painting areas. Its hard to imagine flying some of these planes in combat or having to sit in one for hours as they made their way to a bombing target. Really makes you appreciate the relative “luxury” we have flying on the airlines we do today. I got some neat pictures of a SR-71 Blackbird, Soviet Migs, and a B-17 bomber which is what my grandfather was shot down in during WWII over Athens, Greece (then taken to the Stalag Luft I POW camp in Germany).