San Diego Air & Space Museum puts you in aviation’s cockpit
By Tom Adkinson
March 1, 2024

SAN DIEGO – The A-12 Blackbird spy plane and the Convair Sea Dart on display outside the San Diego Air & Space Museum are silent, but your ears often hear the unmistakable roar of giant airplane engines as you near the historic building.

Is it a sound effect from one of the nation’s best aviation museums? Nope, it’s a real-life enhancement courtesy of airliners on their final approach at San Diego International Airport, a scant distance away.

The Blackbird and the Sea Dart – plus the incoming passenger planes – set the stage for a march through aviation history that stretches from the fragile gliders before the invention of powered aircraft to the Apollo 9 command module, which is in surprisingly good shape after its return to earth from the moon.

One of the museum’s most recognizable aircraft is just inside the main entrance. It’s a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the first plane to cross the Atlantic Ocean nonstop. The original was built in San Diego – as was its replica – and some of the people who worked on the original also worked on the replica. Of note: it’s flightworthy, but not likely to fly again.

The museum is one of the jewels in San Diego’s famous Balboa Park (17 museums and cultural organizations), and there’s a touch of irony in its location – it’s in a structure built to showcase Ford automobiles during the California Pacific International Exposition of 1935-1936.

Just like an airplane, the Ford Building had its ups and downs. After the Depression-era exposition, it was a vocational school, a Civil Air Patrol instructional facility and (ignominiously) a warehouse for the city’s parks and recreation department. It got a permanent assignment in 1980 when the aviation museum, which had been in two previous locations, moved in.

The building is large enough that an aircraft rehabilitation facility is on its lower level, although that’s not on regular public tours.

Among the museum’s standout holdings are a replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer (displayed without fabric on its wings to show the intricate woodwork), a mock-up of the Bell X-1 (“a bullet with wings” that was the first plane to break the sound barrier) and the Apollo 9 command module that flew a 10-day mission around the moon and helped set the stage for Apollo 11’s lunar landing.

One of the museum’s biggest artifacts is a Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat. The massive airplane was built in San Diego, served missions in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands in World War II, went into the Coast Guard’s fleet, appeared in a movie (“The Devil at 4 O’Clock”) and eventually was donated to the museum. After a restoration, it was towed through the streets of San Diego and lifted by crane into the Pavilion of Flight.

A massive piece of two-dimensional art left over from the California Pacific International Exposition complements the scores of airplanes, gliders and pieces of aviation memorabilia.

It is a 20,000-square foot mural called “March of Transportation” that wraps around the core of the circular building. It depicts human ideas and methods of transportation throughout time – and even though it was painted in the 1930s, the artists’ visions of futuristic cars and spacecraft were close to today’s realities.

Trip-planning resources: SanDiegoAirAndSpace.org, CityPASS.com/San-Diego and SanDiego.org