Bob Foos
During a coffee get-together Thursday morning at the Freedom of Flight Museum, some members of the Webb City Area Chamber of Commerce admitted they hadn’t realized how interesting the facility has become.
The museum’s exhibits have grown from the basement of the former terminal, where the museum began in 2013, to other portions of the building, even to the control tower, hangars and former fire station.
In one of the hangars is the volunteers’ major project, restoration of the T-33 Shooting Star fighter jet, which it received as a donation in 2021 when it was pulled from the car lot at Highway 171 and Prairie Flower Road. Once finished, the “T-Bird” will attract visitors to the museum from the general aviation entrance on the highway.
Since its founding, the museum has graced the old terminal building and control tower with a repository of priceless aviation and aerospace artifacts and displays. Darryl Coit, museum president, and Ernie Trumbly, museum curator, started the museum to promote the history of aviation and aerospace in the region.
Although on a “shoestring budget,” the museum boasts extensive aviation and aerospace collections that chronicle flight from the Wright brothers to modern day. There are thousands of exhibits, artifacts, photographs, objects, interactive exhibits and simulators.
Nearly 9,000 students have been guided through the museum on educational tours.
The museum also houses the Air and Space Technology Center, which holds Trumbly’s personal collections of rare instruments controls, avionics, spy and guidance systems, missiles, bombs and other various objects sometimes not found anywhere else.
Whether it’s pilots playing in a B-52 cockpit, kids watching touch and go’s from the old tower, a photo display of a Rocketdyne F-1 Apollo engine or Wernher von Braun, a collection of black boxes and gravity suits, or an ejection seat of a F-4 Phantom, it is a world-class candy store for all things that fly.
“Everyone loves all things aviation. We’ve got exhibits that no one else has,” Trumbly says. “The Smithsonian has nothing on us.”
The museum is open from 2 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.
