Southern Museum of Flight, Birmingham, AL

Museums of flight are often a gateway into the past for aerospace designs and careers. The Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama will take visitors through civilian, military, and experimental aircraft history from the earliest dates of flight. Among the aircrafts on site are some of the memorabilia from flyers of the past and uniforms of these personnel. The facility is 68,000 square feet with 75 different aircrafts, engines, models, artifacts, and more. There are some photographs and paintings at the museum.

The museum contains the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame that includes over 65 biographical renderings that show Alabama history of aviation through biographies. A few of the more notable aircrafts include the Wright Flyer, Curtis Pusher, WWII Fokker D-VII, and F4 Phantom Jet. There are aircraft from all over the world on display in the museum. Some of the aircraft are from Russia and European countries. One of the more important displays is Alabama's Tuskegee Airmen.

Visitors are encouraged to sit down in the theater for a short video on flying, as well as to test out the flight simulators and the Little Pilots Room for children. Tours are offered of the facilities, but one can take a self guided tour. Adult admission is $5 with children at $4. Any active military and their families are offered free admission. The price of membership to the Museum of Flight is $45. There are reciprocal memberships with other museums on the Family Membership plan. Discounts are offered to groups such as school children or other large groups.

School children in grades 2 through 11 are able to take advantage of programs offered through the museum. These programs are study correlated to help enhance a child's learning or at the very least give them some additional information which might help in career choices.

Early Aviation is the first area of display visitors will be seeing. In this section are a number of planes such as the Aeronca, Alexander Eaglerock, Curtis Pusher, Fokker DVII, Huff Daland, and the aforementioned Wright Flyer. The next section of display is the experimental aircrafts. These include Bede BD-4, BD-5, Bensen, Bushby, Mitchell Buzzard, Monerai, Pazmany and Piel Emeraude aircraft. Also on display in this section are the Galsair II, Harrison Minimac, Pitts, and Rand. The Ross Seabird, Rotorway, Rutan Varieze, and Rutan Varivigen are another set of experimental aircraft.

The military section and some of the Russian planes and MIGS are in a different section of the museum that is currently under construction. Some of the planes in this section include the A12 Blackbird spy plane and the Lake Murray B-25 Bomber. There are a couple of types of engines on display. They fit in the Radials and Rotary or Inline and V categories. There are several continental engines like the w-670 or the R-975-46L. Le Blond, Lycoming, Jacobs, Curtiss, Pratt and Whitney, Wright, and Packard Rolls Royce Merlin are other styles of engines on display at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama.