Aileron

When I went traveling for work last week, I was afraid of aviation withdrawal and so took some precautions to be safe (symptoms include attempting to pull back on your car steering wheel, and running around your office making propellor noises). In addition to taking along my study materials and a pretty good flying related book (Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring), I found myself a GA airport with a museum to visit. The museum was decent fun for maybe forty minutes. I wish I had had more time for the gift shop, but I had to be somewhere else. I also booked a hotel at that same airport so I could see the runway from my room. Watching the little planes putter around was comforting.

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The view of the aviation museum from my room. Atop the roof, they have a Rutan Long-EZ, a kit plane that you can build yourself at home. For trivia, this was the model of aircraft John Denver was flying when he fatally crashed (not a jet plane).

Stanley Hiller, at the age of seventeen, founded Hiller Industries in Berkeley, California in 1942 to develop his coaxial XH-44 "Hiller Copter" for the U.S. Army. He had to teach himself to fly while it was being built so he could test pilot it (some people get the aviation bug bad). Hiller Industries eventually became Hiller Aircraft Co., now in Firebaugh, CA, and is still owned by the Hiller family. The family also endowed the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA at the San Carlos Airport (KSQL).

The exhibits focus mainly on the less conventional helicopters by Hiller, like the Hiller Flying Platform, coaxial designs, and tilt-rotor designs; but also on aviation history in general in the bay area, which was quite active since the beginning of powered flight. There were some neat photos of the flying field that was to become San Francisco International.

The museum has some large fixed-wings like a Grumman Albatross flying boat and a huge Boeing Condor spanning the building. Outside, they have the entire front section of a Boeing 747 (with complete cockpit) and a Pratt and Whitney JT9D with the panels off to go along with it. I really wanted to play with the simulators they have scattered about, but so did all the kids running around and I'm not quite mean enough to kick them out of the way.

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The San Carlos Flying Field was established during World War I, but that more or less sank into the swamp so they built another one in another spot in the 1950s and that eventually became San Carlos Airport. It currently has one runway 12/30, at 2600 x 75 ft asphalt. It's about ten miles southeast of KSFO and is listed as a reliever airport for it. The traffic pattern for both runways flies over some swampy bits of South SF Bay. If you're staying nearby and go for a run towards the bay trail, you can run right by the threshold of runway 12, which is good fun when planes are landing.

Grumman Albatross, used primarily for search and rescue over water, but this one was tricked out as a luxury passenger plane.

A Pratt and Whitney JT9D, kind of looking from the back into the fan. Just inside the blue cowling, you can see the ring of thrust reverser petals partially closed. These close completely after landing to redirect the fan thrust out and forward. It was a bit scary standing directly behind the jet nozzle, because yeah, there's no fuel and no starter, but what if we misunderstood something, like in all those movies where they thought the monster was dead but it woke up anyway? It's a good rule in life to not stand behind jet engines.