NC Aviation Museum

We needed to get out of the house but needed something indoors since we were expecting rain all afternoon (and indeed it rained!).  So, we drove to North Carolina to visit the Aviation Museum by the airport.  It's not a traditional museum.  It's just one hanger full of different airplanes and their stories.  There were a couple of displays where the kids could climb and sit in real cockpits and play around with the buttons-- Gavin's favorite of course.

Sitting on the landing gear of a Boeing 747

Playing in the cockpit

Daddy and Gavin sitting in the front cockpit of a F4 Phantom

 Below is perhaps the best exhibit in the museum.  It's the airplane that landed in the Hudson River a couple of years ago.  I didn't know that the original flight was from NY to Charlotte so now it's at its original final destination.  They played a movie about the event and interviews with the pilots and passengers and it made me realize how lucky everyone was they were safe and sound.  It was the pilot's idea to land in the Hudson.  It was not "approved" by the control tower and it probably would have not been since every unplanned water landing in history (I think that's what it said) has ended in fatal crashes.  It was the only option and the captain had to make sure the tail of the aircraft hit the water at exactly 11 degrees at 150 mph or more or else the plane would split open and result in fatalities.  Impressive indeed.

I didn't take a picture of it but they had an exhibit of the "bomb target tracker" that was used at Hiroshima.  I forgot the actual name for it but it's the device that was on the airplanes during WWII and would let the soldiers know exactly where the bomb would land.  Reading about this device gave me flashbacks to when Nick and I visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum and it still upsets me.  Hence, why I didn't feel like taking a picture of it.  I could go on a soapbox about this but that's not the point of this post so I'll skip it.  

When we left the museum the rain had stopped but on our way to the car out of nowhere it started pouring GIANT raindrops-- I thought it was hail at first.  We ran to the car and got in as fast as we could.  I had to feed Liam so we let Gavin "loose" in the backseat and he got to buckle the center seat belt and thought that was great.  The problem was that he cried when we told him he had to sit in his car seat again. :(

It was a fun quick trip outside the house.