Published January 2006

Museum of Flight
puts courage on display

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT A P-51 Mustang, one of World War II’s most famous fighter planes, hangs above other “warbirds” at the Museum of Flight’s Personal Courage Wing, filled with rescued aviation relics of 60 years ago.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

There are few places in the world where so much aviation history is stored and displayed as the exhibits at the Seattle Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, and few displays at the museum that have captured so much attention as the museum’s new $54 million Personal Courage Wing.

When it opened on June 6, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, visitors experienced a new dimension of realism in the museum’s presentation of its newly acquired collection of World War II and World War I fighter aircraft.

Rather than suspending the rare, historic aircraft overhead in a flying formation, or arranging them in static displays on the floor — as the museum has done in its popular, glass-walled Great Gallery — most of the Personal Courage Wing’s two floors of famous fighter planes are shown in diorama-style historic settings.

In the Pacific War theater, a simulated section of a WWII-era aircraft carrier features a Goodyear FG-D Corsair and an F4F-3 Grumman Wildcat, fighter planes with major roles in the island campaigns and air battles. A huge, soaring Lockheed P-38L Lightning, one of the best known fighters of WWII, dominates the first floor.

Elsewhere, exhibits include a bombed-out WWI-era French farmhouse with planes overhead and on the ground; rare, restored aircraft and reproductions simulating an aerial dog-fight over WWI frontline trenches; and a Curtiss P-40N Warhawk is the focal point for the story of the Flying Tigers’ battles over China.

“The whole Personal Courage Wing is designed in a way that makes this a national museum attraction,” said Craig O’Neill, the Museum of Flight’s director of marketing and communications. “We’ve seen occasional examples of museums displaying a few aircraft in historic exhibit settings, but I don’t know of any place where you can see a whole building with 28 planes in such realistic presentations.”

The intent of the Personal Courage Wing is not only to preserve and display some of the most famous aircraft of the two world wars, but also to tell stories of the personal courage, dedication and heroism of those who flew those planes in combat for various air forces of the world.

Essentially a “black box” with a controlled climate, the building’s two display floors were designed to provide a dramatic presentation of famous aircraft in a setting with controlled lighting, soundtracks, photos and dramatic effects that could never be achieved in a venue such as the museum’s glass-walled Great Gallery of historic aircraft.

The new wing also is the official archival repository for the collections of the Flying Tigers group and the American Fighter Aces organization, providing the museum with valuable historic documents, photos and artifacts of World War II and the Korea and Vietnam conflicts.

The three-story, 88,000-square-foot expansion of the Museum of Flight adds a major new attraction to a facility that already is one of the world’s largest air and space museums, drawing more than 400,000 visitors a year with its displays of more than 135 historically significant planes and spacecraft, including the only Concorde on the West Coast.

Related: Center offers glimpse of tomorrow's aviation technology

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