July 26, 2014 - Aerospace Museum of California, Sacramento, CA
I was in Sacramento, California visiting with my parents and we were looking for something to do. So we decided to go visit the nearby Aerospace Museum of California located at what used to be McClellan Air Force Base. I've been here before but it has been six years.
Here is what my Dad calls the "Bugsmasher" -- he flew it during his Naval Aviator days -- but is the military version of the Twin Beech.
They had a lot more planes on static display than I remembered from six years ago. Here's a C-47 (military version of the venerable DC-3) which actually participated in D-Day.
Still talking in front of the F-4 Phantom.
And the big A-10 is always worth a look.
F-105 Thunderchief, commonly known as "Thud" by its aircrews.
Looking head at a Burt Rutan designed Quickie. It was meant to echo the design of the X-Wing fighter of the Star Wars movies.
They had a nice display about Sacramento aviation history including a section about navigation training at Mather Air Force Base. I spent six months at Mather in 1982 at the joint Air Force/Navy navigation school and flew in the T-43 pictured below.
The T-43A had stations on board for twelve navigator students, six navigator instructors, as well as a pilot and co-pilot. The student training compartment was equipped with avionics gear as used in contemporary operational aircraft.
The U.S. Navy merged its Student NFO (SNFO) "NAV" pipeline with the Air Force's UNT program in 1976, forming Interservice Undergraduate Navigator Training (IUNT) with both Navy students and USN and USAF instructors.
Most T-43s were initially assigned to the 323rd Flying Training Wing (323 FTW) of the Air Training Command (ATC) at Mather AFB, California. When the 323 FTW was inactivated and Mather AFB closed by Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) action in 1993, most of the T-43s were transferred to the 12th Flying Training Wing (12 FTW) of the Air Education and Training Command (AETC) at Randolph AFB, Texas, with the 12 FTW assuming the specialized undergraduate navigator training (SUNT) role while the U.S. Navy's Training Air Wing SIX (TRAWING 6), a Naval Air Training Command organization at NAS Pensacola, Florida, assumed a role for training those USAF student navigators slated for eventual assignment to the F-111, EF-111, F-15E and B-1B.
Throughout its service in the Air Training Command and the successor Air Education and Training Command, no T-43 was ever lost in a mishap. Among the T-43s removed from navigator training and converted to CT-43A executive transports, one aircraft assigned to the 86th Airlift Wing (86 AW) at Ramstein Air Base, Germany to support United States European Command (USEUCOM) crashed in Croatia in 1996 while carrying then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and 34 other passengers. There were no survivors and subsequent investigation determined that this was a controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) mishap as a result of pilot error.
On 17 September 2010, the last T-43 flight was flown at Randolph Air Force Base, and it was subsequently retired from the active Air Force service after 37 years of service.
A "Hisso" V-8, forerunner of the high-powered, liquid-cooled engines in the 30's and 40s. This engine powered the WWI Spad among others.
The Curtiss OX-5 V-8 which was the primary training aircraft engine of WWI and was used in many aircraft after the war.
The great Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine which powered Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean. The first in a line of successful air-cooled radial engines that powered many WWII aircdraft.
I'm not sure what this monster radial is but it has a ton of cyclinders. A docent was on hand who had actually worked on these big radials in the Air Force. He showed me where the magnetoes were and how to time them. He said the engines were actually fairly easy to maintain.
The business aspect of an F-86 Sabre.
