Royal Air Force Museum

Yesterday Panton and I trekked out to Zone 4 to the Royal Air Force Museum. It was fascinating. Similar to the National Air and Space Museum in DC, but it is larger and has more displays. Also there's a complete timeline of flight. Of course, I didn't need to read any of the plaques or timeline; more or less, Panton walked around for two hours looking at the displays, and I followed him asking questions, learning ten times more than I would have otherwise.

This is the first large room we entered. Obviously, I can't name all these models, but there were computers on the sides that told you about each one.

This is a close-up of one of the planes above. Each plane had its pilot's name inscribed on it (I assume it's the same today), and the symbols tally how many planes the fighter has shot down in battle. I learned there are several variations of war planes - fighters which shoot each other mid-air (Top Gun style), interceptors which are a subgroup of fighters that shoot bombers, bombers which drop bombs from the bay area onto ground targets, attack planes which shoot ground targets, etc. You can often discern a plane's type from its name - F22 is a fighter, A something is an attack plane, etc.

A Rolls Royce Merlin 23 engine. Planes and their engines are named similarly to cars with the company name, the model name, and the version of the model. As you know, BMW started out building plane engines but was forced to stop after WWI as part of the Versailles Treaty. What I didn't know was that its logo is supposedly a white propeller in a blue sky. However, Wikipedia says that it may have been only been justification twelve years after the logo was created

Panton resting in front of a plane that had been brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. It was incredibly intact considering everything it had gone through.

A bomb that's intended to create a crater and detonate in order to create an earthquake-like situation. It creates a 24 m by 9 m crater (I forgot which dimension corresponds to the surface diameter and which corresponds to the depth). Needless to say, this bomb was huge, but I forget who owned it. Hopefully, only us defense-manic Americans

Slightly ironic from the Nazi commander of the Luftwaffe. As you can see from the cut-off tally, this plane underwent loads of successful missions (I think it was a bomber so those must be the number of locations it hit, not the number of planes it shot down).

Overall, the Royal Air Force Museum was a great way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday. Admission is free, but it's a bit out of the way from central London. And it definitely helps if you have an airplane/science whiz like Panton with you.