Information has emerged that a tornado today caused serious damage to individual buildings at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, including the National Museum of the Air Force, which is located on the base.
Who’s in the know? Was the museum itself and its exhibits badly damaged?
Apparently so. Story says most damage was to the museum’s restoration hanger.
Tornado Damages Wright-Patt and National U.S. Air Force Museum (airandspaceforces.com)
Pics of the museum damage here too. It looks pretty bad.
February 2024 Storm Damage at Wright-Patterson AFB | Flickr
Sorta early in the year for tornadoes.
The National WWII Musuem bounced back from Katrina. I"ll be visiting next week.
This too, shall come to pass.
No pictures from the main Museum, so I pray that the main Museum was spared. Looks like a separate storage hangar and that looks like a F-104B and a P-80 were severely damaged. Inside the hangar, I could clearly see an F-15C Eagle that was spared from major damage.
Just found this news item on YouTube a few minutes ago. Ironic because an hour earlier I was talking about visiting the museum with a friend of mine. I looked it up in the Cincinnati newspaper states it was a weak EF1 that hit the restoration hanger. It has not been confirmed to be a tornado as of yet, it might have been straight line winds, which can also be disastrous. But it looks like most of the damages to the hanger, although there’s what looks like an F-80 it looks pretty banged up outside. They said the hangers are historic, where some of the Silver Plate B-29s were modified to carry the atom bombs. Apparently, none of the other hangers or displays were damaged. But these are initial reports.
Every time I visit the museum I contemplate how terrible it would be if a strong tornado hit one of the hangers. That area is no stranger to devastating tornadoes.
If so then let’s keep our fingers crossed.
