It’s the people, not the planes, that make this museum special
Fort Worth Aviation Museum is a hidden gem.
1:30 AM on Jul 4, 2021 CDT
I had never interviewed a fighter pilot before my visit to the Fort Worth Aviation Museum last Saturday, but I knew the stereotype: brash, cocky. I knew I would have to match their machismo to get them to talk. So I walked up to Maj. Rick Bates and Capt. Garry Goff, both Air Force retirees seated on metal patio furniture in the weedy museum lawn surrounded by larger-than-life jets, and accused them of going to seed while my tour guide, John Ezrow, a retired Lockheed engineer and the museum’s head docent, showed me around because he’s the one who really knows what he’s talking about.
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(This article first appeared in 2019.)
In September 2019, the Air Force Assistant Secretary for technology acquisitions Will Roper called for a new “Century Series” of jet fighters.
He was referring to six U.S. jet fighters rapidly introduced into service between 1954 and 1959 that brought the U.S. Air Force into an era of supersonic jet fighter operations. They later received “Century” appellation due to receiving the designations F-100 through F-106.
Roper wants a faster acquisition process that could churn out new warplanes every four years. That’s understandable. Today’s process is so ponderous that major programs like the F-35 stealth fighter take multiple decades to enter service, leading to outrageous cost overruns and program cancelations, and systems that no longer meet U.S. operational needs when they finally enter service.
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Yes, the Air Force Planned to Use Nuclear Weapons Against Nuclear Bombers
Using nuclear weapons over your own airspace to defend yourself against nuclear attack is more than a little ironic.
Key point: The Cold War was a time of all kinds of wild ideas. However, not all of those actually made sense.
On July 19, 1957 five Air Force officers assembled in the open desert basin of the Yucca Flats of Nevada and glanced with nervous smiles up at a jet fighter flying high overhead. They were accompanied by a civilian defense photographer wearing a baseball hat named George Yoshitake.
The object of their consternation was a Northrop F-89J Scorpion, a two-seat radar-equipped air defense interceptor designed to shoot down Soviet nuclear bombers before they unleash their deadly payload on the United States.