Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

We all decided to sleep in this morning in an effort to try to get caught up a little on our sleep. It seems weird that although we are not working or going to school, we still somehow manage to get less sleep now. Once up, we had breakfast, showers and we were off to the Naval Aviation Museum right here in Pensacola. This is another one of those spots that was recommended to us by some people we met along the way. When we arrived and I found out it was free I knew it was going to be a good day. It turned out to be very impressive. We started off with a trolley tour of the grounds. This tour was given by a former naval pilot who had flown many of the planes he was showing us. He had flown in Vietnam, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and many other locations during his time in the navy. The trolley tour took us out behind the museum where they have a congeries of over 50 planes on display that cannot be housed inside the current museum due to space constraints. The museum itself already has almost 90 aircraft crammed into it. A number of the planes we saw were in the process of being repaired because hurricane Ivan had damaged many of them back in 2004 with its winds of over 140 mph (220 km/h). Yikes! They had some rather interesting aircraft in their collection including:

- Marine One, the helicopter used by President Harry Truman
- The first plane ever to land at the south pole
- A Japanese Zero
- The plane that President George W. landed on the aircraft carrier for his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech

Well, I think you get the idea. They even had planes there that saw duty in Iraq as recently as this year. Lots of interesting and notorious planes. Anyway, we ultimately made it inside where we hooked up just in time for the indoor tour. Unfortunately for the kids, the tour guide was not the most dynamic person. He was a retired naval aviator and his tour was talking about the history of naval aviation up until world war II. In other words, he wasn’t going to be talking about any of the cool jets. His delivery was far too dry for the kids so we gave them one of the walkie-talkies and they did a self tour of more interesting parts of the museum for them. I really enjoyed hearing the stories behind the evolution of the airplane from our guide who knew many of the little details of how they used to work. One thing I found very interesting was the fact that the pre-30s aircraft did not use fuel pumps due to the lack of electricity onboard. Instead they always had the fuel tank mounted above the engine and used gravity to feed the fuel to the engine. This tended to put a fairly tight limit on the amount of fuel you could carry since it had to be stored above the engine. But at some point they came up with the idea of storing extra fuel elsewhere and pumping it to the over-engine tank via an external fuel pump. How did they manage to do this without electricity? They installed a wind-powered pump that is driven by a mini propeller about 6 inches (15 cm) across. Problem solved! And the example we saw was on a Sopwith Camel … remember Snoopy’s plane? Another cool item we heard about was an anti-submarine gun they had installed on one of the big flying boats, or amphibious planes as they are known. The planes back then were designed to be as light as possible. This meant that the plane itself was fairly fragile. So there was a problem when it came to mounting an anti-submarine gun because it would tend to rip itself off the plane when fired. So they created an anti-recoil anti-submarine gun. Sounds like a good idea, eh? Hey, why didn’t they apply this idea to all guns? Good question. Let me explain how it works. It is about twice as long as a normal gun of this type and it is set up to fire an equal and opposite charge out the back of the gun at the exact same time as the anti-submarine projectile is being fired out the front. The recoil of the reverse projectile cancels out the recoil of the forward projectile. Tada! So unfortunately, as you can imagine, that wouldn’t work so well for a normal gun. Once we finished the tour we gathered up the kids and headed to the IMAX theatre there to see The Magic of Flight which was a great movie putting you right in the cockpit of an F-18 with one of the Blue Angles’ pilots. After the movie we only had a few minutes to check out the rest of the museum which. That was a drag so we made a mental note to see if we could squeeze in another visit before we left the Pensacola area. Time will tell if this works out. Then we decided to enjoy a nice seafood dinner by the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Didn’t I mention what a rough life it is on the road?

Today’s word:

congeries \KON-juh-reez\, noun:
A collection; an aggregation.