It’s not everyday you see one of these cruise through the harbor—or docked at the local marina. That’s because Cosmic Muffin, the “boat” you see in the photo on the left, is a true one of a kind: At one time, she was a 1939 Boeing 307 Stratoliner airplane complete with wings, tail, and cockpit, and she actually flew. (The 307 was the first commercial pressurized aircraft and a variant of the B-17 Flying Fortress. Only ten 307s were built, all in the late-1930’s. Production was stopped at the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939.) For more than 20 years, Cosmic Muffin was a houseboat for her proud liveaboard owner, David Drimmer. Today she rests dockside in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, open to the public for touring or chartering. But the story of how she came to be what she is today is even weirder than her looks.

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I just gave my permission for my photo of a Bleriot XI taken at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI to be published in the next edition of the Aerospace Encyclopedia.  Go figure I travel all through the United States and Europe taking airplane photos and they want one snapped practically in my own backyard.

Here are photos from my visit last week.

The open source flight simulator project has just released Flightgear 2.0.

...FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

It looks great and the price is right so check it out!

FlightGear Web Siite

Kalinin K-7 (Russian: Калинин К-7) was a heavy experimental aircraft designed and tested in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. K-7 was of unusual configuration with twin booms and large underwing pods housing fixed landing gear and machine gun turrets. In the passenger version, seats were arranged inside the 2.3 meter (7 ft 7 in) thick wings. The airframe was welded from KhMA chrome-molybdenum steel. The original design called for six engines in the wing leading edge but when the projected loaded weight 2 more engines were added.  The only prototype crashed during a test flight.

Here photos from my recent visit.

From Wikipedia

The SPAD S.VII was the first of a series of highly successful biplane fighter aircraft produced by Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés (SPAD) during the First World War. Like its successors, the S.VII was renowned as a sturdy and rugged aircraft with good climbing and diving characteristics. It was also a stable gun platform, although pilots used to the more manoeuvrable Nieuport fighters found it heavy on the controls. It was flown by a number of the famous aces, such as France's Georges Guynemer and Italy's Francesco Baracca.

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I recently had a chance to visit the Kalamazoo Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

The Zoo is one of the best air museums in the midwest and well worth a visit.  The museum has expanded to include a nice collection of space related items in addition to its great collection of modern jets and World War 2 era aircraft.  Their web site does a poor job of communicating the size of their collection.

Photos from visit can be found here.

The New England Air Museum is located at Bradley International Airport, Windsor Locks, Connecticut, USA. The museum is housed in three large display buildings consisting of more than 75,000 square feet (7,000 m²) of exhibit space. In fair weather, the outside storage yard is available for touring as well.

Exhibits include the history of Sikorsky Aircraft, early French aviation featuring the Lafayette Escadrille, a history of air mail, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Flying Mollisons and the 58th Bomb Wing Memorial.

http://www.neam.org/