I just love to go on tours. When I started college I entertained the idea of ROTC. I would have loved to fly a plane! I had heard or read ( I don’t remember it was soo long ago) that you had to have 20/20 vision to be a pilot. I haven’t had that since I was in about 5th grade. So I haven’t every flown a plane. I have been on a couple and will probably forever be in amazement of them. So when one of the homeschool groups we were in set up a tour of the Tristate Warbirds Museum I immediately signed us up! This gem is tucked about 30 minutes from Cincinnati in Batavia, Ohio. It was formed in 2003 with the intent of educating and promoting and preserving the aircraft history of WWII. Along with preserving and educating they also wanted to honor the veterans.
Check out this Curtiss-Wright P-40M KITTYHAWK MKIII. Obviously it is being restored!
Below you are looking at the engine of another plane!
Now you can’t really tell from this picture, however this engine is HUGE! It stands about 8 feet tall! I am not sure how wide it is or how much it weighs however I know it is a lot! As our docent was explaining about the plane that this engine when into and how they were going to ship it out of state for repairs when the time came, I asked what I thought would be an obvious question. Here in Ohio we have Wright Patterson Air Force Museum. They also do restorations. So here is my question: Why would we need to send it out of state with them here? I found out some interesting information when hearing the response. Wright Patterson restores their plans to how they looked, The Tristate Warbird Museum restores their planes to FLY again!. When each of the restorations are completed the planes can fly and do! The Warbird Museum is the neighbor of the Clermont County Airport. While we were there we didn’t get to see one of their planes in flight, however we did see the runway in action. The airport is used by the University of Cincinnati’s flight school.
This plane was one of the planes that was on a ship. The wing is not broken it collapses! Some wings “bent” back like this and some “folded” up. Back in their time the wings were operated by a manual/hand pump. The planes in the museum were updated with a motor for the wings. This feature came in handy when there was limited space on the deck of the ship. These planes also didn’t really have a runway for taking off and landing. To take off you ran down part of the plane however to land, there just wasn’t the room. So when they came in to land they couldn’t slow down too much in case they couldn’t land, they had to keep certain speed to be able to get back into the air. So these planes were equipped with a hook. I thought this was pretty neat!
We had a really great time hearing about the veterans, from the veterans in the movie that we watched, the planes from the docent and seeing everything first hand. The museum is open to the public on Wed from 4pm to 7pm and again on Sat from 10am to 3pm. They can be reached by phone at 513.753.4500. You can check out the website at
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