Planes, planes and planes

Do you think that could be the title of a really successful movie? Yeah, me neither. But it is a successful museum here at HAFB.
We visited the museum twice last week (it's free!), once with Kenzie's Joyschool class and once with Mike. I thought we went for the girls, but really we went for Mike.

Mike loves airplanes. His room growing up had every airplane imaginable pasted to the ceiling, with models hanging down from their pictures. He wanted to be an airplane fighter pilot, but chose engineering because he's a family guy. I shouldn't have been surprised by how much he loved the full size planes and informational plaques.

They also have a Learning Center where kids can learn about science with all sorts of fun experiments (balance a ping pong ball on a blow dryer, see those magic birds that balance on your finger, see what happens when you try to hold a spinning bicycle wheel and turn on a sit n spin, etc) You can fly a model airplane, play computer airplane games, dress up like an astronaut/pilot, sit in a life-size cockpit, and Mike yelled excitedly, "They have a F-16 flight simulator?!!!" It really is awesome. Unfortunately Mike was unable to learn how to fly an F-16 (his lifetime dream), because they were closing. The Learning Center is only open Thurs, Fridays, and Saturdays for limited hours. We'll be going back I'm sure.
(And if anyone ever has any connections with F-16 flights and passengers, could you please let me know? It really is Mike's dream to fly in one)

Hannah and I fly a plane together in the Learning Center. Good thing they really only let you guide the plane in a small area, otherwise we would be mourning the loss of another airplane. Oh, speaking of Hannah, she's decided that naps are okay again! (Well, not really, but she is falling asleep in the afternoon and staying there for at least an hour.) After two months of her falling asleep during lunch mid-bite or not sleeping at all, she is napping at about 1 or 2 in the afternoon, making me a happy camper! (And she's much happier too)

A volunteer shows Hannah the ping pong ball floating over a hair dryer. Hannah was not impressed and ran away with the ping pong ball as quickly as she could.

Mike, on the other hand, was very impressed with all the science experiments. Here he is spinning some rings. I'm not sure what that demonstrates, but I'm sure it has something to do with gravity and centrifugal force. (Umm, you don't know what that is? Well, Faith Hill sings about it in "This Kiss. This Kiss." You should know about it)

Here we are standing by some large plane, and if you look very closely behind the girls there's a tiny scale model of it that they built before they built the big one.

Here's Mike and the girls in front of Mike's favorite plane the SR-71, or the Blackbird. It holds speed records that have never been broken. It's been clocked at over 2,000 mph! They don't fly them anymore--something to do with it costing $200,000/hour to fly.