Sunday, April 28, 2013

Fighter Factory

Josh and I had our first visit to the Fighter Factory / Military Aviation Museum in Pungo. There are two groups of buildings; the one at the far end of the driveway has the workshop / maintenance area and the WWI planes, while the main building has the WW2 planes and some vehicles.
Some of the planes:

  • P40 with Flying Tigers livery
  • P39 
  • P51 Mustang
  • FW190
  • Yak 3
  • Corsair
  • B25
  • Junkers Ju52--larger than I expected, and the exterior is all corrugated, including the wings
  • Mosquito
  • Spitfire
  • Storch observation plane--they said it had a 300ft takeoff roll
  • Fokker DR1 triplane
  • Fokker D VII biplane
  • Albatross D.Va
  • Sopwith  1 1/2 Strutter
  • V1 flying bomb
They also had a display of the various types of ammo in use, from .30 cal to 30mm, and several vehicles--staff cars, gun tractors, that sort of thing. They also had a British antitank gun from the North Africa campaign, and a 89mm Flak gun in an Afrika Korps paint scheme, which was cool -- nobody was looking, so I sat in the gunner's position for a while, and thought about...well, what I actually thought about was telling Josh to go get the car and see if we could surreptitiously tow it home. We could put it behind the house. I can see the conversation when Diana gets home:
"What's that?"
"It's a tree, sweetie."
"A tree?"
"A fliegerabwehrkanone tree."
"When did you get it?"
"We've always had a tree in the back, hon."



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