U.S. Air Force Museum - Memorial Park

Ever since reading a cracked.com article about a particular plane that is currently at the National Museum of the Air Force, I've wanted to go down there.  Since the weather decided to cooperate with me yesterday, I decided to head down.   Little did I realize, it's been over three years since I was last there.  That is odd for me.

 Sitting next to the museum itself is a little memorial park.  It is actually pretty nice to wander around in nicer weather but it was a bit on the cold side yesterday, so I wandered long enough to get from my car to the museum.  I still took pictures though.  I'm not going to go into details about the monuments, for the most part, I'll just let you look at the picturres.

Many of the monuments are like the one above.  Some are a little more intricate though.

 Strategic Air Command was a major command of the U.S. Air Force that lasted from 1946 to 1992.  It was in charge of all the land based strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.  If there would have been one US Command that would have been synomonous with a nuclear war, it would have been this one as they were in charge of the Air Force's chunk of the major nuclear weapons.  For most of that period, many of the bombers were in constant patrol and could strike the Soviet Union in a matter of hours and many of the missiles were in a constant state of ready and could strike the Soviet Union in a matter of minutes.  I hate to think of how much money we spent on something that we hoped would never be used.

 Many of the memorials are to individual units and in some cases at specific times in their lives.  I think this was one of them.

 I focused closely on this one because I liked how the planes looked like they were ghosts.

 Some of the memorials are pretty unique looking.

 There are a few statues in the park.  I think most of them are supposed to be to a group of people rather than an idividual.

 This momument is dedicated to the folks that maintained the Chinese-Burmese units in the Pacific War.  I think it also included the pilots who were charged with flying over the Himalayas.

 This one was dedicated to the bomber pilots of the Pacific Theater in World War II.

I really like this memorial because it reminds me of the missing man formation.