This morning we left early for a 2-hour drive over to Pensacola.
After church we drove into the Pensacola Naval Aviation Base and went to the National Museum of Naval Aviation.
We ate lunch at the museum’s restaurant which is duplicated after the layout and décor of the Officer’s Club at the Naval Air Station of Cubi Point in the Philippines.
The museum is absolutely enormous with over 300,000 sq. ft. and actually they just added another 200.000 sq. ft. that has been opened up yet.
There are hundreds of restored planes and lots of exhibits plus flight simulators, an Imax theater and also guided tours. Plus, during the summer, you can watch the Blue Angels perform their practice flights on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Blue Angels had their season “homecoming” this weekend and they were holding their change of command ceremony as the new leader of the Blue Angels took command.
With all of us being life-long Missourians it’s neat that the Japanese surrendered aboard the USS Missouri. We’ve been to Pearl Harbor a couple of times and have seen the USS Missouri in the harbor.
A replica of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki
Here’s a radio operator intercepting messages from the Japanese.
I almost flipped back the front page on the clip board to see what was so top secret but I chickened out…
We got to play around with a 40mm anti-aircraft machine gun that could still spin on it’s axis.
You couldn’t help but hit a plane in a place like this.
They’ve got models of a lot of the aircraft carriers. This is a shot from the USS Pennsylvania. I can’t imagine landing my plane on a carrier, but I especially can’t imagine landing it in the early days of the aircraft carrier! I believe that the way it works is the hook on the plane catches the sandbags as it lands and slows the plane down.
I’d certainly recommend visiting the National Museum of Naval Aviation if you’re ever in the Florida panhandle area. We visited about 4 years ago and we made sure to visit again on this trip.
