Adventure Saturday #2 - The Hiller Air Museum in San Carlos

On Saturday, February 18th, my brother and I went to the Hiller Air Museum in San Carlos. The museum has a fascinating collection focusing on the history of air travel, with specific emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. I learned so much about airplanes and air travel in the course of one morning that I was ready to don some goggles and hop in a WWI Biplane by the time I was done. I highly recommend this museum to any and all people who want to learn more about air travel.

Our day started with a nice quiet drive to the Hiller Air Museum. Considering the Bay Bridge being shut down this last weekend for construction, we were surprised at such a quiet and fast journey to the museum arriving just a few minutes before it opened.

The Museum, itself, is housed in one large building - about the size of a modern warehouse or very large car dealership. As you enter the vast main lobby, to the left you will find an incredible gift shop, to the right you will find the main exhibit space, and in the lobby itself there is a glass paneled meeting room (for lectures and such) and a few large aircraft dangling overhead.

The tickets for the museum can be purchased in the gift shop. Now normally I'm against such a blatant grab for dollars by forcing people into the gift shop in order to enter the building, but in this case I'll let it slide because this was quite the gift shop. Almost any kind of airplane or aircraft related item could be found in this gift shop - all of it quality stuff and reasonably priced. I think we spent a good fifteen minutes walking through the gift shop looking at all the wonderful stuff to buy. It actually put me in a great mood for the rest of the museum. We bought our tickets ($11 for adults), got our wristbands, and headed back into the lobby area.

We were immediately met by one of the museum's very friendly and helpful volunteers. He asked us if we'd been to the museum before and when we said we hadn't, he gave us the 19 Cent tour... pointing out where everything was and then showing us on the map. I hadn't even walked into the exhibit space yet and I was already impressed.

We crossed the lobby and entered the exhibit space. The various aircraft and exhibits in the space are presented, more or less, in chronological order from dates prior to the Wright Brothers flight all the way up to the future of air travel and NASA research area. The entire exhibition space is open air with many aircraft being so large as having to be suspended from the ceiling. There were plenty of information cards, plus a cellphone audio tour available at no extra charge.

I learned more about the history of aircraft in the first twenty feet than I had ever learned at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.. Some of the more interesting things that I saw at the museum - a giant picture of a very early aerial exhibition at the area now occupied by Tanforan Shopping Mall, the actual mock up of the nose cone of the SSST plane that was never built by Boeing, a hover disc simulator that Hiller had been building for the military but that was never put into service (think of a one man hovercraft that can fly and you kind of get the idea), and an eastern bloc communist fighter craft still being built today that is so cheap that many westerners (with lots of money) are buying them as pleasure craft - imagine owning your own Top Gun fighter craft!

Upstairs in the main exhibition hall is a observation area where you can see the planes suspended from the ceiling at closer to eye level. There is also an area set aside for flying computer aircraft simulators (much like the ones you can buy for your computer at home) with the assistance of an actual flight instructor. It's an extra cost - $3.00 per 20 minute session - but you can get actual flight instruction while you do it. Naturally, this is where the kids gravitated.

Back into the lobby, looking for Dave, I discovered a vast aircraft maintenance and preservation lab that could be observed through glass. At the back of the lobby there is an open air courtyard that opens on to the San Carlos airfield. In the courtyard is the nose-cone section of a real life 747 jumbo jet. My brother Dave called me on my cell phone from the cockpit of the jet as he was busy playing with all of the myriad controls. I walked out to the back of the jet and entered the nose cone section at approximately first class.

The nose cone has the entire first class section of the 747 - both upstairs and downstairs - as well as the cockpit. I enjoyed sitting in first class - a section I doubt I will ever visit in real life - while my brother pretended being a pilot. Closest thing I've had to a playground experience in 30 years!

We finished our tour in the gift shop again where I managed to avoid temptation... mostly. I shall definitely be returning to this museum in the future. I really had a great visit and am ready to go back and learn some more.