Lyon Air Museum California

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Lyon Air Museum California (Orange County Airport)

Visited the Lyon Air Museum California on Orange County (John Wayne) airport property. Small but very good museum. World War II vintage planes and automobiles. Some classic cars are from after the war. I don’t consider this a “must see” but is a very good museum. They feature a film about 35 minutes long that is about the air war in Europe. Fascinating. Last visit to Orange County missed this one. Here is a link to the museum web site. And to backtrack here is a link to my Florida visit. (Note: On April 25th, 2020, the link directly to the museum site stopped working. This is a link to their Facebook page.)

Pictures of museum

Lyon Air Museum California
B-26 bomber from WWII
Lyon Air Museum California
Specifications of B-26
Lyon Air Museum California
Cessna Birddog – Used as a scout plane in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Built with no defensive weapons. Later, pilots and other crew started carrying rifles and grenades to provide at least minimum defense
Lyon Air Museum
Story about Birddog

Classic car and civilian aircraft

1952 MG
1965 Alfa Romeo – Not sure how this fits with WWII but it was a great picture of a extremely well maintained classic car.
DC-3 civilian aircraft
DC-3. Used by many airlines around the world. A few are still in use today in more remote places in the world. A great airplane.

While there were only 607 DC-3s built for civilian airlines, there were many military variations. Approximately 16,000 were built with most of them the various military versions. Many of the military versions were C-47s and C-53s. Since they were first manufactered in 1936, versions of the plane were also used by the Japanese.

While this isn’t a rock and roll song like other posts, the song “Over There” was a patriotic song. It was written my George M. Cohan and was popular during both World Wars.

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“Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there. That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming. The drums rum-tumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, Send the word, send the word to beware –We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”

Many in the world are continuing to work on peace initiatives, but if a war was every really “justified”, it was WWII. The rest of the world had to stop Hitler. If there is any doubt, just read about the Holocaust. Here is a link to my post about the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. On another sobering note, there are a large number of veterans who take their own life. There is a post here.

The Driveby Tourist