Friday morning at Long Beach:
Not your typical Bridge Shot:
Long Island has a "Cradle of Flight" museum, which I guess makes sense, since there were a lot of flight schools out there in the early 1900s. I guess that leaves Kitty Hawk as the Birthplace of Flight and Dayton as the Womb of Flight.
The obligatory WPA art as you enter the museum. Icarus is the only one who gets a spot as both inventor and plane.
An early place design. A lot of these were intended to touch down on both land and water, but if you tried a design like that with today's engines, it'd rip the wings right off the fuselage.
This is the instrument panel that Jimmy Doolittle used in the first blind flight. It demonstrated that you really needed to trust the instruments, and not the "seat of your pants" feeling that they replaced. "Seat of the pants" was getting a lot of pilots killed, because the inner ear isn't as finely engineered as these gyros. Funny thing is that every instrument in the basic VFR flight training, 80 years later, is here on this panel.
A model assembly line for WWII fighters:
You can make out a lot of actual buildings in this poster, but not the actual Pan Am building. It hadn't been built yet. ("The what?" "There was a building called the...oh, never mind.")
The museum has a IMAX in it, and the control room for the theater is in a fishbowl. Every high school AV geek's secret fantasy. The bottom platter is the spool, the top is the take-up reel. The film feeds from the inside of the bottom, runs up about a story and a half to the projector, and then back down to the inside of the take-up reel, so there's never a need to rewind. Which is good, because the film is 3" wide and worth its weight in gold.
