Hiller Aviation Museum, Part Deux

[ian408]

Poking around the NorCal BMW site, I discovered they were
having breakfast at HobieÔÇÖs and then heading over to the Hillar
Aviation Museum today. Food is good, so I went on over.
You might recall I stopped by recently. Hopefully, no re-tread
pictures though

I've never been on an official tour at the museum so this is a
treat. Not only that but the NorCal organizer has gotten us a
buck off the ticket price!

Dennis is our tour guide.

And a good tour guide he is. Many more facts and figures. It's a
quick tour but fun none the less.

A cutaway radial engine.

And a ramjet helicopter.

Something I hadn't paid much attention to was the Saturn V booster recover helicopter. The idea was it would fly along and
grapple the ÔÇÿchutes of the rocket and gradually pull it into the
payload bay. It was never built.

We saw an early model BMW seat.

As I understand it, Corbin opened up a shop close by offering
replacements

A replica of the Santa Clara.

This is the propeller that ran the old Stanford wind tunnel.

Here's another one of three spy planes the museum has.

We received a brief lesson in Flying the Boeing 747 from
our host, Jim Williams. He arranges all the 2nd Sunday breakfast events (this was my first NorCal BMW event). Jim is a retired
commercial airline pilot and works at the Museum as a docent.

The restoration shop was open. Not sure what this is but they
are rebuilding it as well as making, by hand, several props. I never knew that to be authentic, a restoration can only use techniques available at the time. So no power tools if they didn't exist. They were also building a cutaway jet engine.

I donÔÇÖt belong to any ÔÇ£localÔÇØ club and must say, I enjoyed the
tour and breakfast get together. The Blackhawk Museum (autos)
in Danville is on their calendar for next month. Might have to
check that out...

Ian

 

[1flyer]

Might be helpful to some people if you mention where the Hiller Museum is in case they wanted to stop.

 

[kbasa]

Beautiful San Jose, CA, I believe.

dave

 

[ian408]

kbasa, close but not close enough

You can find the museum at 601 Skyway Road, San Carlos,
California 94070. If you want to call them, (650)654-0200.

You can catch the first half of the report here.

 

[The_Veg]

Not sure what it is...

Looks like a rather truncated dual-cockpit fuselage with a radial angine mount at one end (the structure made of green tubes). I'm guessing that it's from one of those odd planes around the WWI era that had little fuselages like that strung up in the wires and struts between big wings (rather than the more usual full-length fuselage with directly attached wings). But I *AM* just guessing.