Nite-ops at the Warplane Museum

This past weekend we took the Beavers to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton for their Nite-Ops program. This is a special program offered to Scouts, Girl Guides and Cadets only and is an overnight event where the kids do a variety of aviation related activities and then get to sleep out underneath the planes.

The "nite-ops" portion of the program is a late night tour of the planes by flashlight and this was a huge success with all the kids.

About half of the planes are fully functional and they do fly periodically. The plane we camped underneath was one of the functional ones. It was a "tracker" which had served on the HMCS Bonadventure aircraft carrier. I was quite impressed by the hook on the back of the plane that had been used to bring it to a quick stop when landing on the ship. The hook was a lot smaller than I would have expected for such a large plane. The kids were all amazed at the fact that the wings on the plane folded up for storage inside the ship.

The favorite plane for most of the kids was a big bomber. There was a story here about dropping a load of watermelons during a practice run and the thought of a plane dropping watermelons seemed to really grab the kids' attention.

My own favorite was a plane that would drop water on forest fires.

The museum really put on an outstanding event and all the kids had a fabulous time.