Dayton and beyond

From major museums to small airport cafes, here’s just a sampling of places I think are worth checking out. Be sure to add to my list by sending us your ideas. Email [email protected], subject line “destinations.”

Obviously the two big sites are thanks to the Wright brothers. The brothers put two places on the map in their lifetimes: Dayton, Ohio, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. I’m always surprised at Dayton. It used to be a running joke that some editors here at AOPA get all the exotic destinations while others of us get, well, Dayton. But for me, there’s a surprise around every corner in Dayton. Like watching the sun and clouds pass over the carillon at the historical park as Senior Photographer David Tulis so expertly captured (p. 29) and the two bowler hats we discovered in sculpture at Dayton International Airport (DAY). Yes, the Heritage Trail, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, and the Wright Cycle Co. are important places to visit while you’re in Dayton, but do stand in the field of Huffman Prairie and imagine the brothers’ great ideas taking wing, and visit the beautiful Wright home on Hawthorn Hill. Similarly, sites at Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina are impressive; you must climb up to the monument for the view and the visitor center is fascinating, but the real charm comes in walking the length of the first flight and peering into the 1903 camp and hangar like the brothers used and stayed in that cold December in 1903.

For collections of aircraft that will amaze, do not miss Kermit Weeks’ Fantasy of Flight in Florida (see “Pull the Curtain,” December 2022 AOPA Pilot); the Seattle Museum of Flight where you’re greeted by the Concorde; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California where SAM 26000, the fortieth U.S. president’s Air Force One Boeing aircraft puts its nose up against a glass wall overlooking the countryside; and—here’s a sleeper we will be doing a story on later this year: WAAAM Air & Auto Museum in Hood River, Oregon. It has one of the largest collections of still-flying aircraft in the country…and cars, and motorcycles, and toys.

I get a kick out of the Kansas Aviation Museum in the original terminal of the Wichita airport. It has an eerie historic feeling inside, like a time traveler might appear looking for his flight in 1935. Or is that Fred Astaire dancing on the terrazzo floor?

For history, you must visit Moton Field, home of the Tuskegee Airmen in Alabama; the Skunk Works at Edwards Air Force base in California; Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida; Patriots Point in Charleston, South Carolina; and the new general aviation wing “Thomas W. Haas Gallery: We All Fly” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

For fun, visit the waterpark at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, where four different waterslides spit you out from a Boeing 747; the Hangar Hotel on Gillespie Field in Texas; and the country’s best milkshake at an airport restaurant anywhere: Waypoints Café at Camarillo Airport in California. You can do some star gazing there too—Hollywood stars, I mean.

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