I also suggest the italian air force museum near Rome.
https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/home/storia-e-tradizione/m...
(use italian version for the virtual tour, in the english version it's broken, typical italian public administration website, sorry folks).
No clue why this is on the HN homepage, but I love aviation museums. It is so difficult to feel scale with aircraft due to the fact that most of the images are of them flying and so there is no context. Seeing them in person can really help put them in perspective.
It's a pity that clean sheet designs of airplanes made from composites (most famously your Diamonds and Cirruses) are dreadfully expensive to maintain relative to the old school aluminium frame designs. The composite (carbon fiber polymers) airframes have way better aerodynamic characteristics and benefit a lot more from the past 50 years of aerodynamic advances.
If you like this, strongly recommend you check out the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. They have everything you can imagine. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
I also suggest the italian air force museum near Rome. https://www.aeronautica.difesa.it/home/storia-e-tradizione/m... (use italian version for the virtual tour, in the english version it's broken, typical italian public administration website, sorry folks).
No clue why this is on the HN homepage, but I love aviation museums. It is so difficult to feel scale with aircraft due to the fact that most of the images are of them flying and so there is no context. Seeing them in person can really help put them in perspective.
I wonder which planes from that era are "nice to fly" by modern standards. As a point of reference, the Cessna 172 trainer originates from the C170 which was designed right after World War 2. People like to say that the tech industry is young but most of general aviation is only a few steps removed from the early days of Wright Brothers and their contemporaries like Dumont and Blériot.
It's a pity that clean sheet designs of airplanes made from composites (most famously your Diamonds and Cirruses) are dreadfully expensive to maintain relative to the old school aluminium frame designs. The composite (carbon fiber polymers) airframes have way better aerodynamic characteristics and benefit a lot more from the past 50 years of aerodynamic advances.
If you like this, strongly recommend you check out the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio. They have everything you can imagine. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
just the amount of change for ww2 alone is amazing, having moved from biplanes to jets in such a short period of time.
Literally from sticks and canvas to jets in a few decades.