Martin’s Blog

Pima Air and Space museum

So I had a couple of days before my flight home for Christmas and decide I should probably do some tourism. I decided that the Pima Air and Space museum looked interesting.

Their website says that there is no access by bus but I decided to ignore that and get there by bus. So I got a 6 to the Laos transit centre and then a 26 to Littletown rd (which was pretty much a bus tour through the slums of South Tucson). There I was dumped on the side of a road about 2 km away from the museum. But I could see planes in the distance. So I set off across the desert. After crossing a dry river bed and the train tracks and with some fear of being shot by military police or bombed in a training exercise (the museum is right next to the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base) I got there. It was a beautiful winter day, about 23ºC with not a cloud in the sky. That walk could have been fatal in the summer but was pretty comfortable yesterday.

The museum was pretty good. The interactive stuff was pretty ordinary but there were a lot of very nice planes. I got a couple of photos:

The front

and back of an SR-71 Blackbird. This plane flies at over Mach 3 and is the fastest manned jet plane ever. I was amazed at how long it was – most of the photos you see of it are from front on.

A B-29 bomber that flew 26 bombing missions agains Japan in WWII.

A NASA Super Guppy used for transporting shuttle parts.

Some helicopters.

Housing

I am staying at La Aldea, the graduate housing at the university in a four bedroom apartment.

My housemates are Jong, Yushi and Sean (actually Yu-Hsiang) from Korea, Taiwan and China respectively. They all seem nice.

I’ve got a few pictures of various parts of my room.

My workstation. I purchased a desk, chair, speakers and 19″ widescreen monitor. It’s a pretty sweet setup.