Things to Do in Kansas City: The Aviation History Museum

Remember those old black and white pictures of your grandparents descending from an airplane onto the tarmac at some exotic destination? Or the old movies with the stars, cigarette in hand, gracefully gliding down similar steps to adoring fans? If you do remember, and would like to step inside the world they inhabited for just a while, visit the Airline History Museum, at the old Kansas (Charles Be Wheeler) Downtown City Airport. It's a really fun thing to do -- and a great activity for the entire family-- while visiting Kansas City.

Here sit three rare antique airliners of days gone by, a DC-3, A Martin 404, and a Super Constellation or "Connie".

There you can visit the museum exhibits, which consist of three rooms each dedicated to a different theme, and then step into the hanger behind and take a walk onto history and a tour through three historical passenger liners.

When I arrived at the Airline History Museum, I was pressed for time. I actually had to catch a modern jet flight at the new and modern Kansas City Airport in two hours. So I was prepared to take the supersonic tour and breeze through about 80 years of aviation history in a half hour or so.

But my newly added tour companions had a different idea. They were determined to get their money's worth by extending the tour for at least half a day. Seconds before my private tour of the planes was to start, a woman in pig tails (at 50) and a lumbering hulk of a man appeared out of nowhere. She looked like Rebbecca of Sunny-brook farm, and he like an amiable double for Frankenstein, dressed all in black.

I had quickly made my way through the three rooms of the museum, pausing briefly to read about Charles Lindbergh and his being present at the dedication of the old airport, then at a display of log books and items from the early days of mail express, and then, in a case, a six foot section of the tri-motor plane that was torn from the Ford Tri-Motor that Knute Rockne, the famous Notre Dame Foot ball coach, died in. A dissected radial propeller engine hunkered in one corner of a room, and if you had any ideas about being a do it yourself repair guy on this, you could forget it.