Field Trip - Taiwan Avaition Museum

More of a happy accident field trip, as I was staying in Taiwan Taoyouan Novotel Hotel the night before. So I woke to this view:
And since I am a sucker for vintage aircraft and had about an hour to kill before I had to catch the shuttle bus, I grabbed a couple of cameras to stomp around the grounds.

First to catch my eye was a North American T-28, one of the fixed wing aircraft that my dad trained on prior to piloting helicopters:

Since most of the aircraft are positioned close to one another, and with fencing keeping me from getting too close, it was hard to shoot most of these old birds without chopping off parts, like this DC-3's nose:
Still, the right engine still looks cool to my eyes:
North American F-86 Sabre:
Very cool HU-16 Albatross:
What once was the business end of a North American F-100 Super Sabre:
...and its nose:
An all-time favorite of mine since childhood, a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. I built a model of one of these when I was about ten:
Grumman S-2 Tracker:
The Novotel Hotel is in the right half of the office building in the distance. Maybe I'll stay there sometime when the museum is actually open.

Field Trip - March Field Air Museum

There are a lot of perks to working in the bicycle/outdoor industry - one big one are the "industry deals" on all the cool gear that I use. My old Yakima Rocket Box, purchased over ten years ago when I worked at Schwinn in Boulder was still in decent shape, but I really liked some of Yakima's new cargo boxes. After a few days on Craigslist, the old box was gone and I had just about enough cash to purchase one of the newer and better boxes. And instead of spending the $130 or so to have the box trucked down from their warehouse, I took a half a day off and drove up to Riverside to pick it up in person.

a typical view of beautiful Riverside, CA

Driving up Interstate 215 ("the two-fifteen" in the typical California vernacular), I noticed a large collection of vintage aircraft just off the highway at March Field Air Museum. After picking up and securing the box, my next stop was to check out the old birds. Unfortunately I didn't have a real camera with me, so iPhone shots will have to suffice.

SNJ-4 Texan, marked with NAS Glenview, where my dad was once stationed

F-4C Phantom II tail and F-15

one very cool B-29A

B-17G Flying Fortress

KC-97L Stratofreighter

artsy-fartsy version via Hipstamatic

A slew of Soviet MiGs...

MiG-17

MiG-21

MiG-23

...as well as a Polish PZL Mielec An-2:
Some of my favorites tend to be the mid-century jets:

F-102A Delta Dagger

A-7D Corsair II

F-86H Super Sabre

B-52D Stratofortress

inside the B-52's bomb bay

nice computer rack

Both cool as well as sort of eerie was listening to and watching the B-52's left elevator getting pushed by the wind.

B-47E

And some more randomness:

happy bird

polished C-45J

jumble of jets

KC-135 tanker boom

H-21 "flying banana"

And, my all-time favorite:

SR-71A Blackbird

With a top speed: 2,193 MPH, an SR-71 set a world record, traveling 5,645 miles between London and Los Angeles in all of 3 hours and 47 minutes.

Oh, and the new box is pretty cool too.
Looking forward to taking it on a road trip soon.