We didn’t have many days in Pennsylvania, but we wanted to do some things we hadn’t done out there before. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is full of mountains, which means it seems to be a drive to get anywhere. 2.5 hours North of where we were staying, is a little town called Lock Haven. They have a little airport there, with a large brick building, that in big, bold letters says Piper Aviation Museum.
There’s a long history lesson there, but the short version is that the Taylor Brothers created an aircraft company in 1927 in Rochester, New York. The company moved to Bradford, PA, with the town’s businessmen promising to invest, one of those men being William Piper. Stock market crashes and other things caused the company to file for bankruptcy, and Mr. Piper purchased the designs for less than $800. Parting ways with Taylor, and a fire in Bradford, the Piper Aircraft Corporation took over an old silk mill in Lock Haven in 1937.
They have a 15 minute video we watched, giving a quick overview of the history, and then we had a self guided tour through the museum. There were many informational displays about the Piper Family, the history of the aircraft, the development of the airplane designs, and how Piper Aircraft contributed to the war. Then, it was on to the airplane displays!
One of the coolest things we learned was that the Piper was the aircraft used for transporting the real “Smokey The Bear.”
They had a variety of airplane displays, engines, props, and even an old experimental model being built by the Pennsylvania College of Technology. They are working on expanding the museum with more displays. They have a model train display as well, because what’s Pennsylvania without trains. They had a plane set up with Microsoft Flight Simulator, so the kids took turns sitting in the cockpit and successfully took off and landed the plane.
It was a great spur of the moment stop for us. We had not idea that it existed until we started googling for attractions near Penn’s Cave, since we had decided to do the cave tour. Look for that post here.