A good air museum is a treasure for pilots—a great one is a treasure for everyone.
The Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum, with its separate 15-acre Exploration of Flight campus, qualifies as a great air museum. The Denver facility is a treasure that celebrates our military and civilian aerospace history, the myriad people who made it happen and, welcoming the future, uses forward-looking technology in teaching how to be involved in what’s to come in aviation and space.
The History
What would become the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum started as a small part of a large Army Air Corps base in 1937. Beginning in 1988, an evolving group of volunteers who recognized the contributions of the tens of thousands of people who served and trained at what became Lowry Air Force Base kept some aircraft (parked outdoors), memorabilia, records, newspaper clippings, and jotted notes of the human history, events, and aircraft in a space devoted to keeping memories alive and called the Lowry Heritage Museum.
Volunteers stored what they could collect from the time Lowry was established after the Army Air Corps reacted to the deterioration and several fires at its Chanute Field in Illinois by soliciting bids for a replacement training facility in 1934. With the military’s budget cut repeatedly during the depths of the Depression, there wasn’t money to make needed fixes to the badly neglected buildings at Chanute, and it was determined it would be cheaper to build new…