Downtown Airport Field Trip

Christopher and his class took their first field trip of the year to the downtown airport in the heart of Kansas City. The airport has a great museum as well as a hangar full of airplanes that they could go and check out. We had a great tour guide who was a pilot himself and flew some of the older TWA planes back in the 1950s. The kids got to actually go inside two of the planes to see how people used to fly back in the day. Let me tell you, there was some fancy flying back then! They had a section where people could sleep and dine (with silver no less!) and the seats were huge! With no overhead storage, the interior of the plane seemed expansive. Here are some pictures from Hangar 10...

At one point, Ms. Rommel had the children sit down and draw what they saw. Christopher liked this one open engine he saw so that's what he worked on...

There was also a flight simulator that the kids sat in and pretended to fly. The tour guide even connected the radio to O'Hare's air traffic control station so they could listen in to a very busy airport!

Next we toured the airline history museum where they had a large model of a 747. One side of the model was a cross section that showed the seating arrangement in a 747. Now, if you've been around Chris in the past 8 months, you know about his little obsession with seating arrangements in airplanes (i.e.-"Mommy, does that plane have a 3-2 or a 3-3 or a 2-1 or a 2-3-2?" etc). Well this model showed exactly what was upstairs and downstairs and how many seats the plane was across.

Finally, the kids in our group got to watch a short movie about air travel and they watched it in style. First class seats! They were so big that Chris and Andy got to share a seat together...

It was a very fun field trip and it was my first trip as a parent rather than a teacher. It was nice to be responsible for just 2 kids rather than all 18! We will definitely go back to this museum with Daddy because there were still a few things Chris didn't get to do simply because there were too many kids.