Air Museum Network – The Anchorage Museum opens a major exhibit celebrating a century of flight

Anchorage, Alask USA — One hundred years ago, the sound of an internal combustion engine in the sky was first heard in Alaska when James and Lilly Martin sold rides to Fairbanks thrill-seekers. James had built the biplane himself. Lilly was the first woman pilot in England. Alaskans thought the gizmo was a hoot, but no one seemed to grasp the commercial potential. Within 20 years, the gizmo’s ability to go places where there were no roads made it indispensable to life in the territory. On Friday, the Anchorage Museum opened an exhibit titled “Arctic Flight: A Century of Alaska Aviation,” a look at the lore and legacy of flying machines in the last frontier. The show isn’t so much about the principles of flights, said Anchorage Museum curator Julie Decker, but “about how flight changed the way of life in Alaska.””Arctic Flight” features a number of historic photos and films capturing how airplanes in Alaska went from a novelty to the workhorse of arctic exploration to military necessities to a commercial fact of life. It includes items from aircraft piloted in Alaska by Wiley Post, Roald Amundsen, Charles and Anne Lindbergh and pieces of equipment associated with Alaska’s pioneer pilots, from a piece of Carl Ben Eielson’s Hamilton Metalplane to Ellen Paneok’s parka. There’s a shirt made from the skin of the Norge, the only dirigible to have gone over the North Pole, a section of the nose from the first DC-3 in Alaska and a wing from a warplane with Soviet markings that crashed near Fairbanks on its way to the Eastern Front.

The Anchorage Museum opens a major exhibit celebrating a century of flight