| The Yankee Air Museum
is located at the historic Willow Run airport west of Detroit.
This is a great location for an aircraft museum, because it's the same
place that Ford used during world war two when they turned their manufacturing
expertise at the disposal of the American war effort. It took
almost two years to set up the factory in what was then the world's largest
building, but once underway they were turning out a complete B-24 Liberator
in a little under an hour, and by the end of the war they had manufactured
8,800 of the bombers here.
I made the trip over
from Chicago to the Yankee Air Museum twice, timing it on both occasions
to coincide with their
annual air show. It's an excellent way to kill two
birds with one stone, and there's plenty of time left over before and after
the show to browse the static displays of aircraft which have flown in
for the show, and then walk around the museum.
The word "museum"
is a slight exaggeration when describing this place, it's really one of
those open-air displays which happen when amateur enthusiasm for preserving
historic aircraft runs headlong into the difficulties of raising money
for facilities. Although they do have one hangar, I suspect
that it's reserved for the
museum's airworthy B-17 bomber, "Yankee Lady", which you can fly
in during the show - for a price. The rest of the aircraft
have to sit outside on tiny concrete pads sunk into the grass display area,
freezing through the nasty Detroit winters and boiling through the summers.
It's a special shame since the aircraft here are very interesting - some
large aircraft like a DC-6, a B-52 Stratofortress, a four-engined Argosy
transport and a rare PB4Y Privateer, a close relative of the B-24s which
were manufactured here. Surprisingly, a number of the aircraft
are on permanent loan from the USAF museum at Dayton, Ohio - you might
imagine that they would only lend aircraft to places which have buildings
in which to house them.
Apart from the big
birds, the Yankee Air Museum has a really first-rate collection of cold
war jet fighters, including representatives of the "century series"
such as the F-101 Voodoo, F-102 Delta Dagger and F-105 Thunderchief.
These aircraft represent the fullest flowering of American creativity at
a time when technology was advancing by leaps and bounds. Since
then improvements in speed and payload have been mostly gradual and evolutionary,
in contrast to the giant strides made in these areas during the 1950s and
early 1960s. The very well executed display boards standing
in front of each aircraft give a very good introduction to the types of
aircraft which are here, as well as the history of the particular specimens
at the museum. |
