The San Diego Air & Space Museum is letting visitors descend into the part of the building usually hidden from view: a working restoration shop where volunteers rebuild, repair and reproduce pieces of aviation history. The new behind-the-scenes tours add a decidedly hands-on stop to a Balboa Park museum better known for its polished aircraft hanging overhead.
The first public tours of the facility mark a new chapter for a space that had long been off-limits to ordinary visitors. CBS 8 reported that museum President and CEO Jim Kidrick had wanted to open the restoration area to the public for years, with docents and restoration teams now ready to show how the museum’s treasures are built and maintained.
The restoration-area tour is an add-on to regular admission and costs $10, according to the museum’s visitor information. The museum currently lists guided restoration tours on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and warns visitors to expect some noise while the work is underway.
What The Tour Adds Beyond The Main Floor
The main museum already packs in major aviation and space landmarks, including the actual Apollo 9 Command Module “Gumdrop,” a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis and a reproduction of the Wright brothers’ first Flyer. Those displays offer the finished story; the new tour focuses on the painstaking work that makes many of the museum’s reproductions possible, as outlined on the museum’s collection map.
Downstairs, visitors can see aircraft parts, engines and active projects rather than polished exhibits behind velvet ropes. KPBS recently reported that the shop includes a cutaway radial engine and a team of volunteers building a reproduction of Howard Hughes’ H-1 Racer, a sleek 1930s aircraft designed to chase speed records.
The Hughes Racer Is Being Built From Photos
The H-1 project is less a restoration than a careful act of reverse engineering. The museum says volunteers are creating a full-scale, non-flying reproduction of the one-of-a-kind aircraft, using detailed images and measurements because the original design drawings are not available, according to the San Diego Air & Space Museum.
The shop’s work also stretches beyond airplanes. The facility has been restoring a collection of tiny 1960s-era cars for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, an arrangement that helps support the museum while giving visitors an unexpected glimpse of what preservation work looks like when the subject has wheels instead of wings, KPBS reported.
For San Diego visitors, the appeal is that the museum is no longer showing only the final product. The new tour offers a look at the sawdust, tape measures, welding and volunteer know-how that keep aviation history from becoming a static display.
