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I was very fortunate growing up in Phoenix. We had the Champlain Air Fighter Museum in Mesa: one wing was World War I aircraft, the other was WW II fighters! Sadly, the museum was sold off and the planes dispersed to the four winds,, and that was when I was starting out in photography, those negatives are who knows where. Next to it was a (then) Confederate Air Force museum that had a B-17 bomber that, for a very small fee ($5-10?), you could crawl through! And it was air-worthy and went to shows! We had two air bases, Luke AFB and Williams(?), which later shut down, and I went to air shows there where I met quite a number of very interesting aircraft, including the B-1. I remember talking to the crew of an F-4 Phantom, it was from a California Air Guard unit that came over the for the weekend. The F-4 is unique in that the back seater has a duplicate set of controls and can completely fly the aircraft! Anyway, the plane had a unique tank-looking object under the centerline of the fuselage, but it wasn't a drop tank as those have a different aerodynamic styling. I asked the pilot what it was. "Oh, that's a napalm bomb. When we fly to an air show, we have one mounted and use it as a cargo pod to carry our clothes and stuff for the weekend." I thought that was a pretty cool peace-time use for a very nasty weapon! But the best thing about Phoenix, for a fan of war birds was being two hours away from Tucson. Tucson has the Pima Air and Space Museum. It has over a half dozen B-52s of various types, including one that carried the X-15 rocket plane, it has one or two Presidential Air Force One planes, it has an SR-71, a few WW I flyers, many WW 2 and Vietnam era fighters, a NASA transport that flew Saturn stages to Florida called the Super Guppy, transport and cargo helicopters, and many British and Russian birds. Also next to Tucson, 20 minutes or so South, is the Titan Silo, a retired nuclear ICBM silo turned into a museum and managed by Pima. The missile is in the tube, very strategically deactivated and carefully watched by the Russians. I've toured it several times, quite a sobering thing to see. All of the other Titan silos have been destroyed. Needless to say, there's great Mexican food in Tucson, also a wonderful used bookstore chain called Bookman's. They have two locations in Phoenix that I always visit at least one when I'm in town.

I've also been to the Strategic Air Command museum outside of Omaha, Nebraska, which is where I photographed two of the three SR-71s that I have and met my one and only U-2spy plane. I also met the British Vulcan bomber, sadly when I was last there it had been moved outside. Still, I spent a lot of time photographing it - it is in very bad need of a paint job! I understand the last flying Vulcan has been retired, I would have loved to have seen that in the air! A friend of mine used to live in Omaha and I visited the museum twice.