PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR MUSEUM

The Pensacola Naval Air Museum is quite unique. It is a large building adjacent to the runway used by the Blue Angels for their Tuesday and Wednesday morning precision flight exercises.

This is the Sopwith 2F.1 Camel. This is the plane that Snoopy flies with goggles and scarf.

It entered service in June 1917 with No. 4 Squadron of the Royal Naval Air Service, near Dunkirk.

You can see the two .303 in (7.7 mm) machine guns mounted in the cowl. They fire forward through the propeller disc. The initial cowl machine guns were not synchronized to the prop and they quickly discovered what happens when you shoot your own prop. It was not until the Brits examined a downed German plane that they discovered that the Germans had developed a mechanism to inhibit the trigger in the gun when the prop was passing in front of the barrel.

This is the MIG-15 developed in Russia in 1949. The MiG-15 was one of the first successful swept-wing jet fighters, and it achieved fame in the skies over Korea, where it outclassed all enemy fighters except the F-86 Sabre. Over 12,000 of these were built.

Teri is standing under the number 4 listening to the presentation on the NC-4, the first airplane to cross the Atlantic. Lindbergh was the first pilot to fly solo (he didn't even sleep!) direct from North America to Europe.

The mission began on May 8, 1919 with the NC-1, NC-2, and NC4 with a crew of nine in each plane. They left Rockaway, New York , then stopped in Newfoundland before leaving on 16 May for the longest leg of their journey, the flight to the Azores, reached 15 hours later. The NC-1 and the NC-3 were both forced to land at sea due to rough weather and getting lost; the crews were rescued by ships.

While in the Azores the Navy Admiral in charge of the expedition insisted that the pilot in command - A. C. Read - give-up his place so the Admiral could make the grand arrival in Europe, but Read refused and submittted a complaint, which was granted by superiors.

A.C Read's pilots license.

After delays for repairs, the NC-4 took off again and landed in Lisbon, Portugal on 27 May, after 26 hours total flying time. This feat was shortly eclipsed by the non-stop Transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown in a Vickers Vimy when they flew from Newfoundland to Ireland on June 14/15 1919.











Diagram of the NC-4 flying boat and its large empennage on the right. It had 4 12-cylinder watercooled Franklin engines - three pullers and one pusher.

Here is a modern flying boat that is able to land at sea as well as on a normal runway. The NC-4 was strictly a water-landing craft.