The Pima Air and Space Museum

Among the many sites in Tucson is an outdoor air museum whose main attraction are the hundreds of retired military aircraft. Since Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson is where the Air Force stores its fleet of old aircraft and planes to be scrapped, the Pima Air and Space Museum has been able to acquire samples of most of the aircraft that the Air Force has flown as well as aircraft from the Army and Navy. It also recently acquired some Soviet Air Force MiG fighter aircraft.

In past years I have taken my two sons out to view the aircraft which include a T-29 trainer in which I learned air navigation skills while enrolled in the USAF Institute of Air Navigation at the old Mather, AFB in Sacramento, California when I was in the Air Force. They also have a KC-97 tanker aircraft that I flew as a navigator in the Wisconsin Air National Guard.

Recently my wife, son and step-son spent a Saturday touring the museum and taking pictures posing by the KC-97 and the MiG fighters which her father used to fly. You see, back in the early 1970s while I was flying refueling missions in a KC-97 providing fuel to our jet fighters who were guarding Western Europe against a feared attack from the East, my future father-in-law was on the east side of the Iron Curtain flying a MiG fighter guarding Eastern Europe from a feared attack from the West.

Today I am happily married to his daughter and consider his two grandchildren to be my own. Samples of the planes that we once flew now sit silently in the desert basking in the Tucson sun and serve as backdrops for family photos to be sent to the family in Russia.