Olympic Flight Museum, Olympia, Washington
Both Shelby and I had been to the Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle before and we are always looking for something out of the way and different. Before the trip a customer, Jay Florey, had emailed us to see if we wanted to meet him at the Olympic Flight Museum. Well, we were actually staying with friends only about 15 minutes from the museum so that was perfect. On Monday we headed over there with our hosts, Jim and Mary and their son Ian and a friend in tow. In addition to pictures of the planes on display, I put up pictures of the kids playing in the museum's open cockpit aircraft. I figure these kids are the potential next generation of pilots and collectors.
Link to Photos
Link to Museum Website
We meet Jay there and spend a wonderful couple of hours looking at planes and talking about our own collections (of models, of course, not real planes). One of the things I enjoy doing at out of the way museums is looking at what they have on the shelf in their small gift shops. I often find that they have obscure models from Corgi or Franklin Mint, etc., that have been sitting gathering dust since they don't have as much in the way of model collector traffic as we get with our online business. Sure enough they did have some models from Corgi that I had never seen before (a 1:144 scale Lancaster, for example) and quite a few Franklin Mint models that are now hard to find. There wasn't anything I wanted to add to my collection, but one never knows what one will find.
The Olympia Museum is small, but is interesting in that the few aircraft one display are all privately owned and flown on a regular basis. It seems to be a partnership between the owners and a museum group and though small, it is a situation that benefits visitors, the museum, and the aircraft owners. It you are lucky enough to show up at the museum on a sunny day you might get to see the planes in use. Both the SNJ and the P-51 owners had called to say they might be out to fly, but the weather wasn't cooperating so the flights did not happen while we were there. There are other planes in the collection, but they don't have room to display them all so they rotate what is in the museum.
The other slightly odd thing about the museum is there is more of a focus on maintaining flyable airplanes then on authenticity. The blue on the P-51 Mustang is really not a historically accurate color, the Zero is a converted AT-6 which looks good, but is too big for a real Zero, and the HH-1K is glossy green instead of Olive Drab. Apparently this is one of only 2 flying HH-1Ks in the world, but the museum attendant readily acknowledge that the glossy green looked a bit strange on this bird.
Still, the fact that these aircraft are still flying is incredibly important. Paint jobs can always be changed. Plus, for a good sized donation to the museum you can get a flight in one of these aircraft ($450 for a ride in the SNJ, $1100 for the P-51). Too much for me, but nice to know it's an option for some folks. It's hard for this small museum to compete with their big neighbor Boeing to the North, so they don't try to compete, instead they give you that up close and personal access to the aircraft that a large museum can't do.
Thanks for following my travels
Steven Howland
www.diecastairplane.com
No comments:
Post a Comment