PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 95 an endurance record in this very plane in 1929. “A truck would drive along underneath them and match them and then they would take fuel up to refuel the aircraft!” The aviation museum recently marked its own big milestone. “We just celebrated our two millionth visitor coming through the doors,” cheers Jon. He adds that Hiller sees roughly 120,000 visitors per year, with around 10,000 of them coming with school field trips. The museum offers plenty of hands-on experiences for its young visitors. They can crawl into cockpits, toss parachuters into a miniature wind tunnel, work on engineering and design projects at the Invention Lab or operate quadcopters at the netted Droneplex. On weekends, they can also test their mettle at the Flight Sim Zone, where many a Boy Scout has earned an aviation badge. Under the instruction of real pilots, aspiring aviators take a virtual flight across the Bay, learning to navigate and land their aircraft with rudder pedals, yoke and throttle. For those who want to make their mark on a plane—quite literally—there’s Hiller’s “very nonhistoric, non-glamorous” Cessna Cardinal. Visitors cover it with washable-paint handprints in a rainbow of colors. “It’s glorious,” Jon grins. Except for that one time when permanent paint accidentally got used. “That was not my favorite month with the Cardinal,” he admits. When they’re not covering it in handprints, kids can climb into the Cardinal’s cockpit, manipulate its controls and flip its switches. “It’s unusual to find kids who haven’t been on an airplane ride today. But the experience of flying is very, very insulated from the actual aircraft,” Jon observes. After all, when you board at the airport, you’re traveling through a jet bridge that deposits you straight into a row of airline seats. “You don’t really experience the aircraft even when you’re inside Ticket to the Past PHOTOGRAPHY: (LOWER LEFT) COURTESY OF HILLER AVIATION MUSEUM ABOVE: The Hiller XROE-1 Rotorcycle was invented in the mid-1950s as a self-rescue device dropped in a pod to downed military pilots behind enemy lines. It proved too impractical to use. Not only would stranded pilots need to assemble and operate it, but it would be hard for rescue crews to send it parachuting down into enemy territory without attracting attention.
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