USAF Museum

On Saturday, I made a trip with my in-laws (The Outlaws) to one of my favorite museums in the world, the USAF museum! It was a brisk 32°F outside, low ceilings, and the wind was blowing with typical Dayton ferocity - it was a long cold walk through the parking lot, but inside the museum, it was three hangars and 15 acres of wondrous flying machines under roof! Is there a better place to enjoy aircraft on a cold, blustery, IMC day? I think not. Where else can you see a B-1, a B-2, a B-58 Hustler, a B-47, an SR-71, and an AC-130 gunship in the same place, let alone in the same room! It was totally heaven for me. I especially enjoyed taking my 6 year old nephew around and telling him about the airplanes - not that he's going to remember exactly what I told him, but hopefully the excitement I tried to convey will stick a little. I snapped a photo of Beth with her mom & sister, just underneath the nose of the museum's B-17 "Shoo-Shoo"....I don't think that they realized they were in the same frame as the risque nose art! Har-har-har.....:) My nephew, Adam, enjoyed running all over the museum - most of all, he wanted to "get into the airplanes". Unfortunately, you can't get into too many of the airplanes, but there was an F-16 and an F-4 cockpit mockup that was kid-friendly. We sat in the cockpits and flipped switches, launched missiles, and made airplane noises, until the next middle-aged guy in line started to get uneasy and we knew it was time to let someone else have a turn. Rounding out the visit, we watched the IMAX movie: Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag, which was actually quite good. One of my biggest beefs with IMAX movies over the years has been a lack of sufficient "feels like flying" footage. This movie has TONS of cockpit and wing mounted cameras - very cool, and there were a couple of really cool sequences flying through some scattered clouds that reminded me of my recent flight over the Appalachians, albeit at 500kts:). The opening sequence of the film involves an F-15 pilot taking off, and rocketing through 10,000ft before leveling off in 10 seconds or something crazy. Beth leaned over to me and said "Honey, we need to climb like that, instead of bouncing along all day." You're not kidding! Now, I just need to figure out how to get a 1000fps climb out of the DA-40....I'm thinking twin-turbos, four-blade prop, and boring the cylinders. Does anybody offer a turbine conversion kit?