Pima Air and Space Museum

Yay!  I figured out how to load photos again after Windows 10 was reconfigured.  I went to the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson last week.  Very cool!  They have a large collection of airplanes mostly ranging from the 1930s to the present day.  This is an F-4 Phantom...it was the primary fighter jet during my Navy days in the 1970s.  Land or carrier based.  Still used in some countries.

The F-14 succeeded the F-4 beginning in the 1970s, and remained in wide usage in the US forces til around 2000.

This is the SR-71 Blackbird, a spy plane used for several decades beginning in the 1960s.

A Mig-21, staple fighter of the Soviet air force.  This airplane was pitted against the F-4 in Vietnam...and also in the Middle East.

This massive airplane is a B-52.  It's too big to fit in a hangar so it's parked outside.  The wingspan is close to a football field in length.

A massive transport plane used by NASA, known as the "Super Guppy".

This ol' prop plane was actually Air Force One from 1961 to 1965, so JFK and LBJ rode it.  A later AF1 used by LBJ is on display at his ranch in Texas.

The classic WWII bomber, the B-17.  This was the heavy duty bomber the US used to bomb Germany from 1943-45.  It was tough duty.  The airplane was not pressurized or heated, so the aviators flying it at 25 to 30 thousand feet had to use oxygen masks and wear extreme cold weather gear against temperatures of 25 to 50 degrees below zero F.  It was extremely hazardous...the majority of bombers were eventually shot down by German fighters or antiaircraft fire.  Many airmen who parachuted out of their planes were killed on the ground by fanatical Germans; the rest went to prison camps.  

The tail section of a B-17.  The gunner was isolated from the rest of the crew and had rather flimsy defenses against enemy fighters.  Definitely hazardous duty.  Downright heroic, I reckon.  

Crewmen usually decorated their airplanes with nose art, more often than not in the form of comely ladies.  

A B-29.  This is the airplane that bombed Japan late in WWII.  It was an improved version of the B-17 with a pressurized cabin.  The atomic bombs were dropped from B-29s.

A P-51 Mustang, generally considered the best fighter airplane of WWII.  Even though it was a prop plane it could fly well over 400 MPH.  This particular airplane was flown by Louis Curdes.  Blow up the pic and you can see inscriptions for the airplanes he shot down.  In Europe, he downed several German planes and one Italian aircraft.  He was then shot down and imprisoned in Italy, but escaped and resumed flying in the Pacific theater against the Japanese, and shot down one of their aircraft.  If I remember the story correctly, the American flag on Curdes' airplane came to be there when, while flying a mission, he came upon a US airplane running out of fuel and heading toward a Japanese force.  Curdes instructed the plane to ditch in the ocean, which it did, and then he radioed for units to come and rescue the downed aviators.  This was successfully done, and for guiding the US airplane to ditch in the ocean, Curdes apparently got credit for downing a US plane, though in a completely friendly situation.