Flying High at EAA Airventure

Over the weekend we took the girls to Airventure Museum. It's a really neat place that teaches about the history of aviation.



The first thing Alyssa noticed when we walked in the front doors was the The Wright B Flyer, she went running up to it so excited that she knew what it was. Last summer we had the chance on the way home from vacation to drive through Dayton, Ohio where we saw the birthplace of aviation, and learned about the accomplishments of Orville and Wilbur Wright in the area of flying. Speaking about the possibility of air travel for humans, Orville Wright said, "We could not understand that there was anything about a bird that would enable it to fly that could not be built on a larger scale and used by man."

Visiting the Aviation Trail and reading about their struggles and failures in creating what they called their Flying Machine, was amazing. The people who lived near them and watched them in the experimental phases of their project called them crazy and even thought they had a death wish. But for the Wright brothers, they couldn't fathom the possibility that their dream to fly was impossible...and now modern air travel owes it beginnings to their discoveries. I was glad that our day in Dayton had left an impression on Alyssa! It was neat to see her excitement that she recognized the flyer and also to see her interest to learn what EAA had to say about the Wright brother's contributions to flying.


There was a section on the science behind flying.


There was also lots of hands on stuff for the kids to explore.


There was an entire hanger devoted to aircraft from World War II.





















There are two soldiers in the back of this photo leaning over a jeep to repair it. Alyssa convinced Rebekah that these men were spies and the girls proceeded to duck down low in front of the display to hide from them, listen to their conversation (I'm sure it yielded a lot of wartime secrets) and devise a strategic plan to outsmart them. Oh, their imaginations!


Emma holding up a newspaper article reproduction that announced the end of the war.























The museum was also full of simulators of all kinds. Hot air balloons, gliders, F-22 fighter jets, etc. The girls loved trying them out.























Alyssa was a very intense pilot. And she was over the moon when her name showed up on the EAA Young Eagles Log Book.


It was also very cool to learn about the S.C. Johnson family. In the late 1990s Sam Johnson made an exact replica of his father, H.F.'s Johnson's S-38 Sikorksy. A look-a-like of which, is behind the girls in this photo. In 1935, H.F. Johnson traveled to Brazil in his S-38 that eventually sunk. Being greatly moved by the poverty he saw there, he had several herds of livestock sent to the struggling villages upon his return home.

After his father's death, his son Sam made the replica of his father's plane and took a trip to Brazil as a means of accomplishing the dream his father had for him. Sam Johnson and his sons flew down the Amazon River to Brazil where they were shown fields in which they could see the descendants of the livestock their father and grandfather had given so many years earlier. In the video we watched about this, he said of his trip that he had never felt so connected to his father's work and legacy than he did when he was able to visit Brazil and see the impact of what his father had done for the people there.


Taking a few moments to be silly and model by the model :-)