Talahasee FL - National Naval Aviation Museum

We headed just across the Alabama-Florida border to camp at Big Lagoon State Park. This is a great State Park just off the Gulf Shore, nice spacious sites with trees, water, and electricity. The National Naval AviationMuseum was our primary visit today. We ended up spending 3 ½ hours here. We took a tour of the museum with a former Navy pilot and he was a superb guide. While we were waiting we took in about ½ the second floor. The plane engines and jets were the highlight of this floor. From the earliest air-cooled propeller engines to modern jet engines, each of them were cut open so you could see how they operated. We only had time for about half the second floor, which included exhibits on the USS Enterprise, lots of flight simulators, and educational facilities for kids.

Curtis A-1 Trainer

We spent most of our time on the tour viewing the World War I and II planes and hearing the stories from our guide. Most of the World War I airman were trained on a Curtis A1 trainer. The average World War I pilot only survived 42 days on the front. Because of the casualty rate, none could be married, but most had a dog as a companion. Some men ended up having 2 or 3 dogs as their friends died and they took care of the dogs. Some brought their dogs up with them. After one wreck, they couldn’t identify dog or pilot from the ashes, but there was the dog’s metal tag with his name. This led to our armed forces wearing “dog tags” for identification purposes. Our men originally flew French planes, but they had a problem – their front mounted machine guns would cut through the propellers. Then they were flying Sopwith Camels (Snoopy’s plane), which had metal parts on the propeller to avoid being cut down by the machine gun, but bullets would fly in all directions. The pilots also wore leathers because the castor oil used to oil the engine would end up all over the cockpit. The Germans were primarily flying Fokker’s which didn’t have a problem with the machine guns. When we captured one, we discovered that they had a gear on the camshaft that would stop the machine gun as the propeller went by. 

NC-4 Flying Boat

We all know that Charles Lindbergh was the first to cross the Atlantic, non-stop and solo. The first plane to cross the Atlantic, however, was the Curtis NC-4 flying boat and they did it in 1915! The biggest problem was they had to navigate across the ocean with no instruments and needed to refuel periodically. So the Navy stationed 30 ships across the Atlantic every 50 miles. The plane flew from one ship to another, often tracking the smoke from the boilers. Since the plane was the first American plane to reach France, the tradition is that all American planes have a trail number beginning in N since the tail of this plane was NC-4 (Navy-Curtis plane 4). This flight was over shadowed by the first non-stop transatlantic flight two weeks later. 

Our primary story about World War ii planes was comparing the Japanese Zero with the American F4F Wildcat.  We had no other fighters for the first 20 months of the war. The F4F was built like a tank and could take a lot of punishment, but it weighed a ton more than the Zero, which meant the Zero could significantly outmaneuver our planes. Their pilots had been at war for 10 years, giving them 1000’s of hours of fighting experience vs. our pilot’s minimal experience. We lost a lot of planes. But by having two F4Fs take on each zero and go into a thatch weave pattern, the zero would have to choose one of the planes, leaving the other in position to shoot it down. The first pilot to do this, was sent home before he could get his Ace (5^th kill) in order to train others. At the battle of Midway, the Japanese lost 800 zeros and their pilots, which turned the air war around.

German WW II Jet

We saw lots of other planes, especially flying boats, but I’ll end this story with the jet that Germany had developed in 1942. Lucky for us, Hitler was not impressed, and didn’t really start producing these jets until 1944. Two unique features on this plane. At the front of the jet engine was a pull bar that you pulled like starting a lawnmower to start a 2 stroke engine which started rotating the jet engine. The tires on this plane looked like tractor tires, because at this point in the war, most of the airstrips had been bombed. So the planes would take off and land on the autobahns scattered throughout Germany. This is where Eisenhower got his idea for our interstate system and funded it as a Defense Department initiative.