Although my favourite pictures from the Pioneer Flight Museum were of the ground-based vehicles, the aircraft are the star of the show. Here’s the main hangar with a World War I Fokker Triplane fighter in the foreground. Behind it is a Blériot monoplane of the type which inventor and engineer Louis Blériot first flew across the English Channel in 1909.
From an engineering standpoint, these planes are absolutely fascinating since their workings are completely visible and easy to understand. A couple of things I found interesting on the Blériot were the fact that it has no control surfaces on the wing – the pilot steers by twisting the whole wing via cables attached to the control column. Its speed indicator was also beautifully simple – a single pitot tube on the landing gear with a pipe to a vertically-fitted cylinder presumably containing a ball or weight of some kind (I couldn’t see from the ground) in front of the pilot.
For the technically inclined...