It’s Not About the Plane
By Lane Wallace
December 2007
 "Everything we do here has to meet five criteria," Kermit says as he whisks me through a full-scale set of a B-17 bomber awaiting a pre-dawn departure for a raid over Germany. I step past a snowbank outside the wooden briefing shack, shivering in the dark and robustly air-conditioned display area as I strain to hear Kermit over the discomfiting sound effects of a World War II British airfield on alert against a night attack. "It has to be thought-provoking, emotionally engaging, bump you 'off-center,' light a spark within you, and do all that in a way that everyone can relate to."
Well, let's see. So far, I've been in Kermit's Fantasy of Flight museum in Polk City, Florida, about 15 minutes. And in that time, I have experienced the following sights and sensations:
I was first led along the interior of a drafty, noisy jump plane fuselage while being told I was going to have to jump into the black void of a night sky to enter the rest of the museum. (Turns out that, for the moment, no actual jumping is involved, although Kermit says plans are in the works to incorporate a jump line and blind descent on a harness. But the power of suggestion was effective, nonetheless.)
After that bracing intro, I got a reprieve in an ethereal chamber of bottomless sky, where a dream-filled wind caressed my face as I leaned out over a railing into a moving landscape of clouds. Straight from there, I was plunged into a realistic re-creation of the horrors of World War I trench warfare, with Sopwith Camels engaged in dogfights over my head while artillery boomed, explosions lit the smoke-filled night sky around me, and a German soldier, deep in a reinforced trench redoubt, pled via radio—in authentic WWI German slang—for an unlikely rescue.
Escaping the trenches, I found myself immersed in the chilly winter of England, preparing for a hazardous bombing mission. After a sobering briefing, I climbed into an authentically restored B-17, where I was instantly surrounded by a startling loud barrage of machine-gun fire from enemy fighters. Explosions from flak burst into my eardrums as I made my way past the waist gunner stations to the bomb bay, where a video of the doors opening and the German industrial landscape appearing far beneath me coincided with the jarring release sounds of our eight 500-pound bombs dropping toward their target.
Emerging from the uncomfortable racket of a battle-field bomber into the chill night of a lonely English airfield, where a mechanic is working to repair the fire and flak damage from our flight, I have at least a taste of how the infantry felt in the hell of the Western Front, and how the B-17 pilots and crews felt on their bombing missions. Or, by contrast, what might seem possible in a world of clouds, with the wind in your hair. And I haven't even reached the main display hangar yet. Which I suppose means that Kermit Weeks, the resident wizard at the Fantasy of Flight, isn't doing too badly when it comes to those criteria of his. Even though he emphasizes that everything I'm seeing is just a baby taste of his true vision, or what he hopes to offer in the future.
Strangely enough, this is my first visit to Kermit's museum, even though I've been to Sun 'n Fun at nearby Lakeland several times since the Fantasy of Flight museum opened in 1995. I suppose I thought I'd already been to my share of museums, seen my share of B-17s, and didn't really need to see any more, even if people DID say Kermit's place was "different."
What those people didn't tell me, though ... and what might have motivated me to visit earlier ... was what, exactly, was different about this particular air museum. Because, incongruously enough, what sets Kermit Weeks' air museum apart from every other one I've ever visited, from the Smithsonian's in Washington, D.C., to the Air Force's in Dayton, Ohio, is this somewhat radical notion: The Fantasy of Flight air museum is not actually about airplanes.
"I have no interest in teaching or preserving history," Kermit tells me as we're heading into the immersion experiences that greet every visitor to the museum. "I don’t care where the story comes from as long as it relates to and teaches the human experience."
Not that there aren't airplanes galore to see at the museum. Kermit Weeks owns the largest private collection of historical aircraft on the planet (140)—a luxury afforded by the fortuitous discovery of oil off the coast of Australia by his geologist grandfather when Kermit was starting college. And not that Kermit himself doesn't possess some serious aviation talent or credentials—two years of aeronautical engineering at Purdue University, two national aerobatic championship titles in a plane he built himself, and the distinction of being rated among the top three aerobatic pilots in the world five separate times.
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