The Spruce Goose is huge. Like... mindblowingly big. Look at the comparison against the 747 on wikipedia if you don't believe me. I was actually a little disappointed with the rest of the building that the Spruce Goose was in. There were a bunch of neat airplanes, but the interpretation was nonexistant. Because I'm a huge dork I could fill several volumes with boring information, but the typical passerby would have no idea how much boring information they are missing out on! OTOH, the space hangar next door was extremely well intepreted... so maybe they are working on redoing the plane hangar?
Some pictures, with information where I feel I can bore most effectively.
Spruce Goose tooling. Huge!
A Rutan Quickie. Neat looking airplane.
Apparently how Howard Hughes really made it was his dad invented this oil drilling tool seen above.
This really bothered me. The placque talked about how accurate a replica this particular airplane was, but in 1917 when it was made pinked tapes (the tapes you can see with the triangular edges) did not exist. Instead, they took a regular tape and separated the fibers along the edge (pulled some of the strands running along the chord out) to get extra surface area. Ie, it was frilly at the edges. 2 thumbs down. If you're going to claim it's a very accurate replica, you've got to be balls to the wall to the end. Also I realize I'm probably one of 100 people in the world that would nitpick this... but still.
A forest of vortex generators
Spruce Goose Wine!
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