City - San Diego State - CALIFORNIA Country - United States
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Took a day trip to San Diego with the family and was able to visit the USS Midway Museum. It was all dressed up for the 4th of July and I think a band was scheduled to play but it started to rain and the show was cancelled for that day. The museum has plenty of airplanes and helicopters, flight simulators, self guided tours throughout the ship and some veterans who actually served on it.
It was in service from 1945 through 1992. Became a museum in San Diego in 2004.
Some interesting facts from Wikipedia: USS Midway (CVB/CVA/CV-41) was an aircraft carrier of the United States Navy, the lead ship of its class. Commissioned a week after the end of World War II, Midway was the largest ship in the world until 1955, as well as the first U.S. warship too big to transit the Panama Canal. A revolutionary hull design, based on the planned Montana-class battleship, gave it better maneuverability than previous carriers. It operated for an unprecedented 47 years, during which time it saw action in the Vietnam War and served as the Persian Gulf flagship in 1991's Operation Desert Storm. Decommissioned in 1992, it is now a museum ship at the USS Midway Museum, in San Diego, California, and the only remaining U.S. aircraft carrier of the World War II era that is not an Essex-class aircraft carrier.
Since this was my first time there, I'm not sure if they have always had all of those airplanes and helicopters on board. I think they have such a large collection because it is a naval museum. Inside the ship they had a room with a model of every US Navy helicopter.
Interesting that you mentioned the movie Top Gun. I checked and the aircraft carrier used in that movie was the USS Ranger which in March of this year was on it's way to the scrap yard : (
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{K:35606} 7/4/2015
