Kansas Air Museums

Test your skills in a flight simulator at Wichita's Exploration Place learning center.

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Boeing built B-29 bombers in Wichita during World War II before converting its giant plant to build commercial airliners. At Wichita's Exploration Place learning center, Boeing sponsors the Exploring Flight and Design exhibit. You can test your skills in four flight simulators and create 40-foot-tall wind patterns you control with a real airplane propeller.

Also in Wichita, tour the wind tunnels where aircraft components are tested at Wichita State University's National Institute for Aviation Research. The city's Kansas Aviation Museum, in and around a 1930s Art Deco airport terminal, includes exhibits ranging from the original control tower to a giant B-52 bomber.

The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson ranks with the Smithsonian Institution in the number and quality of space exhibits (60 miles northwest of Wichita). Displays include a sleek SR-71 Blackbird spy plane and Soviet space suits.

The Mid-American Air Museum showcases more than 90 planes in Liberal (215 miles southwest of Wichita). A WWII B-25 bomber is on display, as is an F-14-A Tomcat Navy jet flown in the Desert Storm conflict.

Military aircraft line up at Topeka's Combat Air Museum and at the Naval Air Museum in Olathe (a southwest suburb of Kansas City). You can tour the house where pioneering flyer Amelia Earhart grew up in Atchison (55 miles northwest of Kansas City).

Exploration Place Museum >>
National Institute for Aviation Research >>
Kansas Aviation Museum >>
Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center >>
Mid-America Air Museum >>
Topeka Combat Air Museum >>
Olathe Naval Air Museum >>
Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum >>