Misawa Air and Space Museum
07/07/18 01:24
Dear Elliot, Emmala and Eliza,
Today was a rainy day and so we decided to do things that were indoors. We went to the Misawa Air and Space Museum. A long time ago, even before your grandma and grandpa were born, Misawa began to be an important place in Japan for flying. Japanese engineers and aeronautical designers experimented with different kinds of airplanes and Misawa had an air base with a long runway that was a good place for training pilots. It also has a very big lake, so it became a place to train pilots in flying over water and flying the kinds of airplanes that can land on the water.
The Misawa Air and Space Museum has a lot of displays that you can touch and interact with. There is a place where you can experience reduced gravity like the surface of the moon. You get to see how high you can jump. There are other places where you can fly model airplanes and do other interesting things. They have a wind tunnel where you can go inside and hold a wing and see how an airfoil creates lift when it passes through the air.
They also have a collection of real airplanes. Many of them are outside and it was raining, so I didn't get pictures of all of them. The one at the top of this post is an F-16, which is the kind of airplane that Mike works on. I also took a picture of a Japanese Zero, which was a very famous airplane during World War II. And I took more pictures of airplanes that were interesting.
The orange airplane in the picture is a replica of the first airplane to fly nonstop across the Pacific Ocean. It is a Bellanca J-300 called Miss Veedol. Two men flew it from Misawa Japan to Olympia Washington in 1931 to set the record. The airplane in the picture was used for a reenactment of the flight in 2011. They had a display with all of the gas that it took to fly the nearly 5500 miles from Japan to Washington.
Next Thursday, we'll fly from Japan to Washington, but we'll be on a modern 767. We'll have a much faster and much more comfortable trip across the Pacific.
The Misawa Air and Space Museum has a lot of displays that you can touch and interact with. There is a place where you can experience reduced gravity like the surface of the moon. You get to see how high you can jump. There are other places where you can fly model airplanes and do other interesting things. They have a wind tunnel where you can go inside and hold a wing and see how an airfoil creates lift when it passes through the air.
They also have a collection of real airplanes. Many of them are outside and it was raining, so I didn't get pictures of all of them. The one at the top of this post is an F-16, which is the kind of airplane that Mike works on. I also took a picture of a Japanese Zero, which was a very famous airplane during World War II. And I took more pictures of airplanes that were interesting.
Next Thursday, we'll fly from Japan to Washington, but we'll be on a modern 767. We'll have a much faster and much more comfortable trip across the Pacific.
