OSHKOSH 2010 -- Sunday at the EAA Museum · · PAGE 14.

July 25, 2010: We rode the tram back from the Classic airplane section and caught the bus over to the EAA Museum.  This would be my first time to go inside the museum in all the 6 or 7 times I have come to Oshkosh.   This being Edward's first Oshkosh experience, we absolutely had to come to the museum and have a look inside.  We entered the galleries on the upper level, thus the view here of the Wright brothers replica as flown in the first powered flights in 1903 in North Carolina.

This Super Chipmunk was flown in a number of air shows by Art Scholl.  I saw him perform at Kissimmee, Florida when I lived near there in 1978.  He always sat in the back seat to fly this airplane to make it more responsive to aerobatic maneuvers.   The last flight taken by Art was for the movie "Top Gun" when he was doing some spins over the Pacific Ocean as part of making footage for the movie.  The airplane he flew that day had a lead weight on a cable that could be used to shift the center of gravity of the airplane to insure a classic "flat spin" that would mimic the scene in the movie.  There was a problem when it was time to resume normal flight after capturing the film needed for the scene.  The airplane continue to spin until it crashed in the ocean.  Art, the airplane, and the camera with the film footage were all lost.  You will see his name in memoriam in the credits of the movie "TOP GUN".  You can learn more about this amazing aircraft on the EAA museum web site. 
http://www.airventuremuseum.org/collection/aircraft/de%20Havilland%20DHC-1B-2%20Chipmunk.asp

These airplanes are all pylon racers

The EAA has a flyable replica of "The Spirit of Saint Louis", the first airplane to fly non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh as the pilot.  Actor James Stewart, also a bomber pilot during World War II, and a retired Brigadier General from the USAF, played the role of Lindbergh in the 1957 movie.   There were two replicas built for the movie.  One was destroyed in a fire in California, the other is in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Remember the Fairchild airplane with the folding wings on the previous web page?  Here is the same model in the EAA museum.  You can see the flaps laying on top of the wings the same way we saw them out on the airport flight line.

Here is a "Quikee" design from Burt Rutan with the front canard wing also containing the main landing gear.  The wing behind cockpit gives it more lift, and the tail plane is for pitch control.  This is also a racer.

Burt Rutan also designed Space Ship One, the first private space craft to accomplish sub-orbital space flight beyond 328,000 feet above the surface of the Earth.   It is powered by a rocket motor since it has to fly in the airless vacuum of space.   Coming down from space it is in this configuration before it slows down enough to flatten out the tail booms and fly as an unpowered glider the same way the space shuttle returns from space.

Burt Rutan's Voyager was the first airplane to fly around the world non-stop without refueling.  US Air Force B-52 bombers have made the non-stop trip around-the-world faster, but were refueled in flight by air force tankers.

Here is the Cirrus VK-30, N33VK.

In the back gallery entry area and a functioning hangar is the very first prototype P-51.  There were a number of changes to this design before I went into production in World War II.  There are two extra guns synchronized with and firing through the propeller arc.  The center machine gun the three wing-mounted guns is down lower than the other two.  The spacing changed and all three are in-line in the production P-51.

Many of the parts of this one-of-a-kind airplane were hand made in the shop, not mass-produced.

This sign on the "runway" tells the key facts about this unique airplane that was the first of many of its kind.