The Fleet Air Arm is the flying section of the Royal Navy, and the collection concentrates on naval aircraft.
\nHall 1 \u2013 100 years of naval flying \u2013 various fixed wing aircraft and helicopters
\nHall 2 – World war II , with various planes, including a rare Fugi Ohka Kamikaze aircraft., and several exhibitions
\nHall 3 \u2013 The \u2018Aircraft Carrier Experience\u2019 audiovisual display, and \u2018Projecting Power\u2019 an exhibition about the Fleet Air Arm\u2019s postwar missions.
\nThe \u2018Aircraft Carrier Experience\u2019 is the museum\u2019s showpiece, and starts with a simulated flight in a Wessex helicopter. You land on the deck of a carrier, with full-sized aircraft parked around. Aircraft noisily take off on missions. Then you visit other parts of the carrier such as the control room and lifts. This is all rather well done, but it does take about an hour to go through the whole thing, and once you have embarked on the sequence you can\u2019t easily get out without going to the end. Parents are warned that the noise and vibration of the \u2018Wessex flight\u2019 alone is enough to terrorise nervous children.<\/p>\n
Hall 4 \u2013 contains several aircraft including a Concorde, and exhibitions about theory of flight and the Falklands, plus access to public viewing areas of the adjoining air station, where operations may be in progress.
\nThe minimum time to go round and see everything is 4 hours, and the museum recommends an all day visit. It\u2019s just as well that there\u2019s a late admisson discount for the last 1\u00bd hours before closing.<\/p>\n
The FAA Museum\u2019s unique selling point is that it displays good quality aircraft in their original condition, which is not at all the same thing as \u2018in flying condition\u2019. When one sees a vintage aircraft overhead, and after seeing what goes into making them airworthy, one has the feeling that one is looking at the air equivalent of the hammer that has had three handles and two heads. The FAAM planes have the original everything, down to the original paint job. In the Museum there\u2019s an exhibit that made me feel a bit sad every time I saw it \u2013 a prototype naval aircraft from the 1950\u2019s, still pristine and shiny, which has never flown and probably never even had its engine fired up.<\/p>\n
You might want to know that the reserve collection is just across the road, and opened for visitors once a year, when it attracts visitors from all over the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Fleet Air Arm is the flying section of the Royal Navy, and the collection concentrates on naval aircraft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daysoutblog.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}