"It looks just like steel!"
A year ago, my family paid a visit to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. Unfortunately, Dad was sick that day, and he's the one (well, apart from me) who really wanted to go. So this year we decided we had to go again, and this time he was feeling well enough to come along.
The Evergreen Aviation Museum is one of those museums that got started because it fills a specific need. It's the same phenomenon we have seen with some of the museums serving the amusement industry...the museum operated by the Carousel Society of the Niagara Frontier in the old Allan Herschell factory is a good example: the location and contents of the museum were defined by a desire to preserve the Allan Herschell company. The Evergreen museum has a similar history. The museum started as a display hangar for one remarkable aircraft, then the rest of the space was filled with additional aircraft, some of it from the collection of Evergreen Aviation.
The early aircraft are well documented. All those words keep my Mom the writer busy.
A Gee Bee replica. This would be a neat design for a suspended coaster car...
This Tri-Motor once made the air legs of the T-A-T coast-to-coast service.
Dad checks out the bus that goes with the Tri-Motor.
The dimensions of the hangar are impressive, and while the room is stuffed full of airplanes, it has a very open feel to it because the front and back walls are almost entirely made of glass. Initially it appears that there was some effort to apply some form of chronological order to the displays. At the entrance, there are some very old airplanes and replicas of very old airplanes, including the obligatory Wright Flyer replica and some historical notes on some of the aircraft. As you get deeper into the museum, though, both the ordering and the interpretive signage seems to fall by the wayside. Some of the displays are elaborately crafted, such as the Ford Tri-Motor and the passenger bus that goes with it. The Tri-Motor had originally been owned by T-A-T and had operated on the first transcontinental passenger service back in 1929. I was particularly interested in that one because I have a pair of commemorative medallions from the Port Columbus International Airport, one from 1981, one from 2004, which note that the T-A-T service was the first coast-to-coast passenger air service. The materials displayed at Evergreen indicate that the service, which used both railroads and aircraft, used CMH as the easternmost air terminal on the route [Footnote 1]. Other displays are barely identified, such as the Lockheed SR-71 on display, with one of its supersonic turbofan engines pulled out to afford a closer look.
The H4 Hercules dominates the museum and is too big to photograph. Here you can see part of the right wing.
With the silver varnish it looks like aluminum, but in the cross section you can see it is more like plywood.
A look inside the giant aircraft. Most of the structure is Duramold, a wood composite.
Of course, the museum's central attraction, literally sitting in a 7-foot pit in the center of the museum, is a gigantic seaplane, more than 200 feet long, 79 feet to the top of the tail (the Tri-Motor is parked under the tail section) with a wingspan of 319 feet. The eight propellers are nearly 20' in diameter, positioned some 30' in the air, powered by 3,000 horsepower rotary engines. It's the Hughes-Kaiser HK-1, or the Hughes H-4 Hercules, if you prefer. Constructed during World War II, the engineering and construction took so long tha the aircraft wasn't completed until long after the war ended. In 1947, it flew once on a demonstration flight, and was then parked in Long Beach, California until a few years ago. Then it was dismantled, moved to Oregon, and reassembled in 2000 as the central exhibit in this museum. As if its specifications aren't impressive enough, the H-4 Hercules, best known by its nickname, the Spruce Goose is made almost entirely out of wood. In order to preserve wartime strategic materials, Hughes took the same kinds of techniques that started with the construction of roller coaster track and refined them, combining thin plywood-like layers of lumber with glue, wood filler, tissue paper, and varnish to create a composite material called Duramold. The result is a strong, lightweight material that when finished actually looks and performs like aluminum or steel. It was one of the first, if not the first, aircraft built using composite materials, meaning its construction employed the same techniques as those used for building, say, SpaceShip One. Different materials, to be sure, but the concept of layered materials held together with an epoxy resin is very much the same. The H4 Hercules was itself a failure, but its development ultimately made it possible to build both gigantic airplanes, and composite aircraft.
The Hughes Long Beach Hangar model
Since my last visit, the movie The Aviator has come and gone from theaters. You may recall that the movie was about the life of Howard Hughes, who built the Spruce Goose. I haven't seen the movie, but for the film a miniature set of the gigantic hangar where the HK-1 was built had to be constructed. Also a composite wood structure (though with more in common with roller coaster track than the airframe!) the hangar was specially built for the airplane. The model was specially built for the film, and now sits beneath one of the wings alongside the aircraft. The model is finely detailed, and gave me a chance to try my hand at miniature photography.
I don't think the Lunar Lander qualifies as an "aircraft", it being designed to operate only in an air-less environment!
These photos show an early instrument flight trainer. The simulator capsule is linked to the instruments on the desk.
The rest of the museum is an eclectic collection of aircraft and related stuff, most of it looking as though it was chosen to fill space in the museum. It's an interesting collection, and if you're in the Portland area, it's certainly worth a visit. For more information, the museum's website is located at www.sprucegoose.org.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: The reason I have those medallions is the subject of another lengthy story. Someday I'll relate it here; suffice to say that I produced some materials which are now stored in time capsules in the airport terminal: an essay I wrote in 1981, and a disc containing a copy of this very website as it appeared in 2004. [Return to text]
--DCAjr
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