This is the sight that greets you as you drive in to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, OR, about 1/2 an hour east of Portland - one of the best aviation displays I have ever been to. This monstrous airplane is the one and only famous (or infamous) Spruce Goose, one of Howard Hughes's many follies. The entire museum was built around this giant aircraft, and you can easily spend 1/2 a day or more here. By the way, if you are looking for some sort of scale, there are people standing by the windows in the lower right corner of the photo.
Inside, you stand with your neck craned and jaw opened as you look up at the Spruce Goose, and then compare it to the other airplanes in the display. The small red and white plane in the foreground is a famous GeeBee racer from the 30's... for scale, it's about 22' long. That's smaller than the silver pontoon you can see hanging off the Spruce Goose's wing!
The cavernous back 1/2 of the goose is given scale by the 6' tall mannequin in the photo. What you can't see is another whole deck below, accessed through the dark open hatch in the lower center of the photo. The flight deck is accessed from this deck by a 30-step spiral staircase!
A famous WWII B-17 Flying Fortress sits in the foreground... completely dwarfed by the Goose. The B-17's wingspan was about 103'... the Goose's wingspan was 320'!!! The B-17 carried a bombload of 6,000 lbs... the first proposed Goose, HK1, was designed to carry 750 fully-armed combat troops. The H4, the only one ever completed, and now on display at the museum, only flew briefly once, and it's capacity was never tested.
The evening light allows the artificial lights inside the museum to illuminate the Goose, and show off its massive size. As well as the Aviation Museum, there is another equally large Space Museum (to the right of this one), and a full-sized IMAX theater. The next phase is being completed as we visited today... to the left of this building another equally large building is nearing completion as a waterpark, complete with a 747 on the roof that customers will climb up to and then waterslide out of... you have to see it to believe it! This museum is well worth a special trip for any aviation enthusiast!
This is the sight that greets you as you drive in to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, OR, about 1/2 an hour east of Portland - one of the best aviation displays I have ever been to. This monstrous airplane is the one and only famous (or infamous) Spruce Goose, one of Howard Hughes's many follies. The entire museum was built around this giant aircraft, and you can easily spend 1/2 a day or more here. By the way, if you are looking for some sort of scale, there are people standing by the windows in the lower right corner of the photo.
Inside, you stand with your neck craned and jaw opened as you look up at the Spruce Goose, and then compare it to the other airplanes in the display. The small red and white plane in the foreground is a famous GeeBee racer from the 30's... for scale, it's about 22' long. That's smaller than the silver pontoon you can see hanging off the Spruce Goose's wing!
The cavernous back 1/2 of the goose is given scale by the 6' tall mannequin in the photo. What you can't see is another whole deck below, accessed through the dark open hatch in the lower center of the photo. The flight deck is accessed from this deck by a 30-step spiral staircase!
A famous WWII B-17 Flying Fortress sits in the foreground... completely dwarfed by the Goose. The B-17's wingspan was about 103'... the Goose's wingspan was 320'!!! The B-17 carried a bombload of 6,000 lbs... the first proposed Goose, HK1, was designed to carry 750 fully-armed combat troops. The H4, the only one ever completed, and now on display at the museum, only flew briefly once, and it's capacity was never tested.
The evening light allows the artificial lights inside the museum to illuminate the Goose, and show off its massive size. As well as the Aviation Museum, there is another equally large Space Museum (to the right of this one), and a full-sized IMAX theater. The next phase is being completed as we visited today... to the left of this building another equally large building is nearing completion as a waterpark, complete with a 747 on the roof that customers will climb up to and then waterslide out of... you have to see it to believe it! This museum is well worth a special trip for any aviation enthusiast!
Comments