April 17th; Airplane Museum in Oberschleissheim, Germany

This was the day we were to join our bus tour at a hotel out past the airport, so we spent the morning getting ourselves out there. Since Easter Monday is also an official German government holiday, we had to walk over to Hauptbahnhof to find a place to eat breakfast that was open. After breakfast we bought our tickets, returned to the pension to pick up our luggage and check out, and rolled our wheelies back to Hauptbahnhof to take the train out to the airport. We hoped to find a bus that would take us further north to the town of Schwaig where our "NH" hotel was located, and sure enough number 512 went exactly out that way, stopping almost in front of the hotel. As our bus driver put it to Monika when she asked how far the hotel was from the bus stop, "Fall down twice and you're there!" At the hotel we checked in, dropped the luggage off in room 222, and rested for a bit while we considered what to do next.

I had seen a brochure for the Deutsches Museum's auxiliary airplane museum out at Oberschleissheim, and I wanted to see that if we could squeeze it in before the 5 p.m. initial meeting of our bus tour. We checked the bus and train schedules and decided we could eke out a two hour visit and still make it back for our meeting, so we caught the 512 bus on its return trip back to the airport and took the S-1 train from there over to Oberschleissheim. From the station we still had to walk about a mile to the museum, and along the way we passed a very pretty palace which might be worth a visit when we have more time to come back to Munich.

The airplane museum itself is built at one end of a small old airport, and in some ways reminded me of the Experimental Aircraft Association's facilities adjacent to Wittman Airport at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but on a much smaller scale. By the time we arrived it was after 1 p.m. and we were extremely happy to find a nice restaurant just off to the side of the first exhibit hall. It turned out that the museum had two exhibit halls of aircraft with a restoration facility kind of sandwiched in between. Currently the folks there were restoring a WWII era Heinkel bomber, a prodigious task given the size and age of the airplane. You have to realize that all of the WWII aircraft were slapped together in a hurry to meet wartime exigencies, and so none of them was really "built to last" and that makes the preservation even more difficult.

I very much enjoyed the wide variety of aircraft either on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. Sailplanes were very popular in Germany from before WWII, and those were suspended from the ceiling so that their long, graceful wings could span the halls without interference. We saw the first sailplane to cross the Alps, and both Monika and I agreed that it had taken a lot of moxie to do that. I got nervous just flying an old, beat up Cessna 150 over the Rocky Mountains and if the engine had quit I would have become very, very anxious indeed (no obvious emergency landing fields), so my hat's off to the gentleman who soared across the Alps. Another unusual sailplane hanging from the ceiling had the pilot kneeling down face forward in an almost prone position in the cockpit with his hands on a teeny, tiny control yoke. I thought it looked like fun since it would be the next best thing to having wings attached to your arms, but Monika thought it looked rather uncomfortable.

Hang gliders and ultra lights were also hanging from the ceiling, and I was surprised that Germany had an ultra light category that had a 150-kilogram weight limit, or about 330 pounds. That is noticeably more than the 256-pound weight limit for U.S. ultra lights, and from my point of view those extra 74 pounds could make all the difference in the world in the safety and durability of the aircraft. Some of the hang gliders were recreations of Otto Lilienthal's designs from the 1890s, and that reminded me very much of other gliders of that type that we had seen at the Lilienthal Museum when we toured the old East Germany during Wanderung 2.

The heavier aircraft were all sitting on the floor, of course, but I enjoyed seeing nice examples of antique and classic aircraft, many of them from the U.S., "up close and personal". A Cessna 195 looked like it was sitting in a showroom, and the English legend on the plaque gave a fair recounting of Cessna's tremendous contributions to General Aviation in the U.S. and in Europe. All the plaques had excellent English translations, by the way, and I appreciated that as our time was short and I had to read quickly. Another beautiful example from the Golden Age of aviation was a Waco biplane, again perfectly preserved. One little aircraft with a four cylinder, in line, air cooled Hirth engine had a curious statement on its plaque to the effect that it was just visiting the museum and would be taken out to fly again when the weather improved in the spring. I guess it was just inisde hibernating for the winter!

Newer examples of both commercial and home built aircraft were also scattered across the exhibit areas. An old DC-3 dominated one end of one hall and a gorgeously smooth and sleek Lancair homebuilt was in another. The story of one homebuilt was quite curious in that the gentleman had spent 22 years building his uniquely designed homebuilt biplane and finally flew it successfully for about 30 minutes on his first test flight. Unfortunately, that was also the plane's last flight because his wife prohibited from ever flying it again! I expect that confronted the guy with a pretty difficult decision, something like "Keep wife, donate plane to museum" versus "Keep airplane, donate wife to museum"!

Seeing all the guys clustered around the exhibits, clearly desperate to fly, made me realize how lucky I was to have been able to own my own airplanes, fly for over 500 hours, and even fly that creaky old Cessna 150 from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. I suppose some of the guys there would have given their eyeteeth to do such a thing. Flying is much more complicated and expensive in Germany and that, I think, prevents many folks there from taking it up the way many of us do in the U.S.

The final section was military aircraft, both of U.S. and European manufacture. Some Russian aircraft had come from the old East German Air Force after the reunification of Germany in 1989, but had been restored to excellent shape. The displays included other oddball aircraft such as a SAAB Dragon from Sweden and the World War II era Storch courier aircraft. The landing legs on the Storch were at least 5 feet high and so ungainly that it really did look a bit like a stork, whereas in reality it was an extremely effective short field take of and landing airplane.

At the end we had to hustle back through Oberschleissheim to catch our train and bus back to the hotel, but we did make it back for the 5 p.m. meeting of our tour. Osman, our guide, outlined our itinerary for the next week, warned us that the bus did not have bathrooms, and cautioned us about drinking the local tap water during the tour. We were finished well before 6 p.m. and spent the evening relaxing in the ambience of a 4-star hotel--probably if they had crammed a bidet into the bathroom they would have hit 5 stars but that's just speculation on my part. We didn't think there was much a functional difference between our 0-star pension and our 4-star digs, but having a non-smoking room made a huge difference to me as I could sleep without my eyes watering and the back of my throat getting raw.

According to some tidbits we heard on the evening news, the countries of the European Union are influencing each other in rather surprising ways. The French were contemplating building a new nuclear reactor to generate electricity, and around 20,000 marched in protest at the proposed construction site. However, the observers on the scene estimated that only 1 out of 5 of the protesters were French, with the rest coming from Germany and a few other EU countries. It looks to me like the French themselves have pretty much decided that lacking any coal, gas, or oil reserves, the nuclear option is the way to go, but the strident anti-nuclear wing of the German Green Party is trying to prevent the construction of the new reactor. Of course, good luck telling the French what to do in their own country!

Conversely, the European Union is pressing Germany to reduce its rate of smoking by taking concrete actions like establishing no smoking zones in restaurants and stopping cigarette advertising. The Germans replied that almost 1/3 of restaurants had voluntarily instituted no smoking sections, and they seemed to think that was good enough. What about the other 2/3 of the restaurants? Furthermore, my direct experiences cast doubt the effectiveness of those voluntary rules. First off, many smokers just ignored the "no smoking" signs typically put on one or two tables at the back of the restaurant. Secondly, the non-smoking sections were never physically separated from the smoking sections, and lacking any separate ventilation system the smoke drifts right over into the non-smoking section. We ate out at least two or three times a day during our brief stay in Munich, and I often ended the day reeking of cigarette smoke. In terms of recognizing the fundamental right of persons not to be assaulted by cigarette smoke and establishing real smoke free environments, I'd say Germany is about 10-15 years behind the U.S.

The German government was also contesting in court the EU requirment that cigarette advertisements be curtailed, and there I had a feeling of deja vu all over again. The Marlborough Man and Joe Camel are still riding high in Germany, with the predictable result that the percentage of teenagers who smoke has been steadily increasing rather than decreasing as in the U.S. This is not helped, of course, by the cigarette vending machines on many street corners where kids of any age can just drop in their allowance and immediately get a pack of cigarettes. Despite the clear public health issue, the cigarette companies have stymied any curtailment of their right to advertise in Germany, apparently claiming it is a protected part of free speech. That should ring a bell for my U.S. readers as we went through all those arguments about 10-15 years ago and decided that the principles of free speech protected by our Constitution does not include the right to shout "Fire" in a crowded theater and does not include the right to push addictive, carcinogenic fags on teeny boppers. I think the acid test for Germany getting serious about reducing cigarette consumption would be getting rid of those streetcorner vending machines.

To round off the evening we watched an episode of "Tatort" (Crime Scene), a German mystery series. It was a gritty, somewhat realistic version of a detective show somewhat on the order of the old "Hill Street Blues" series. In any event, it had a realistic villain and kept us guessing until the end. Fortunately we were able to relax enough to get to sleep fairly soon afterwards, as our bus tour started bright and early the next morning.