Travis Air Force Base Museum review (plus a nuke!)

Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, has a free airplane museum.  In order to get on base, you have to show your ID, car registration, proof of car insurance, and submit to a quick (5 minute) criminal background search at the visitors center just outside the main entrance.  Then, a soldier will come by the center and you follow him/her in your own car to the museum inside the base.

There are about three dozen old-timey USAF planes parked.  This Douglas C-124C Globemaster II was my favorite.  It's so big and un-aerodynamic.  Its clamshell loading doors could swallow up 200 fully equipped soliders or 127 patients lying on stretchers.

That's a Beech C-45H Expeditor underneath the Globemaster's wing:

You can even park your car next to some of the planes, like this F-102A Delta Dagger interceptor.

Here's an F-101B Voodoo.

F-86L Sabre.  Its rival in the Korean War was the MiG-15.

F-84F Thunderstreak:

F-105D Thunderchief.  Originally intended to drop nuclear weapons at high speed and low level.

Wing belonging to C-47 Skytrain:

The plane in the background is currently in use by the military.

The B-52 was much smaller than I had imagined:

Douglas C-133 Cargomaster:

The museum is run by volunteers and contains quite a few memorabilia and historic photographs.  You can even climb into a couple of training cockpits.

The engine room was neat.

I did a double take when I came across this replica of the Fat Man atomic bomb (dropped on Nagasaki).  It's on loan from the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in New Mexico.