Throughout the year, Oakland Aviation Museum has several events to provide continued interest, learning opportunity and activities for the visitor. 

2012 EVENT SCHEDULE

OPEN COCKPIT DAY

Join us for a special day of fun at OAM.  Sit in a Korean War MiG-15 and feel what it would have been like to fly for the "other side" in America's first war of the Jet Age.  Get a glimpse of the training involved for Naval Flight Officers in the 1970s in our Navy A-6 simulator trailer.  Image yourself taking off and landing on a carrier deck in the Navy A-3 Sky Warrior. 

Open Cockpit Days are also your chance to tour the Solent Flying Boat from the movie "Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark" at no additional cost.  A food vendor and eating area will also be set up so you can spend the day and have lunch.

Our Open Cockpit Day schedule for 2012 is:

June 17 - 12:00pm to 4:00pm (Father's Day)

August 12 - 12:00pm to 4:00pm

September 23 - 12:00pm to 4:00pm

SPEAKER SERIES

OAM has developed another intriguing and informative series of presentations for 2012.  Our guest speakers this year will cover fascinating subjects including Pan Am from politing flying boats of the 1930s to being a stewardess in the '60s and '70s, history of early aircraft designers and aviators Like Moye Stephens and John J. Montgomery, and modern airliners from construction of the Boeing Dreamliner to deconstruction of older fleet aircraft.  All Speakers Series presentations begin at 1:00pm on their respective dates.

Our Speaker Series schedule for this year is:

April 14, 2012 - Barbara Shultz

Barbara will speak about her book, Flying Carpets, Flying Wings: The Biography of Moye W. Stephens Early flying in southern California

As a pilot flying Standards, Jennys, and Thomas Morris Scouts in the early days of aviation in Southern California, Moye Stephens formed associations with names like Clover, Rogers, DeMille, and Chaplin, as well as Hughes, Hancock, Bellande, Northrop, Clarke, Nomis, Breeze, and many other notable aviators.

We’ll learn of his days flying trimotors for Maddux, TAT, and TWA and his piloting a Stearman C3B, nicknamed the Flying Carpet, around the world for author Richard Halliburton in 1931-1932. This is the first factual narrative of that flight based on airplane logs, original maps, and letters home from Moye to his parents.

Also discussed will be Moye’s involvement in the forming of Northrop Corporation in 1939 and test flights of the N1M, N9M, Black Widow, and other Northrop prototypes

Barbara has been an aviation historian for nearly 25 years.  She is a pilot, owning her own 1950 Cessna 140A.  Barbara has also authored The Wedell-Williams Air Service and Pancho: The Biography of Florence Lowe Barnes.

May 19, 2012 – Arue Szura

Arue Szura served for 12 years as an Executive Secretary for Transocean Air Lines between 1948 and 1960.  During those years, she was present from its early years as the first airline established at Oakland Municipal Airport, through its rise to become the world’s largest supplemental air carrier to its ultimate decline in the late 1950s.  During Transocean’s hayday in the mid ‘50s, it had 57 bases and employed 6,700 people around the globe.  2,200 employees populated its base here at Oakland North Field at that time.

Arue will be sharing inside stories about the various personalities that made up this giant of an airline.  She’ll tell of the many interesting and occasionally bizarre flights from the transporting of millions of dollars in Thai gold from Japan after the war to Fort Knox, to carrying monkeys in the late 1940s for Dr. Saulk’s polio vaccine experiments.

Arue authored and in 1989, published the book Folded Wings: A History of Transocean Air Lines, due for republication this year.  Arue is retired and now lives in San Leandro, California.

June 16, 2012 - Doug Scroggins

Doug Scroggins is the Managing Member and Co-Owner of ARC Aerospace Industries and Scroggins Aviation, both specializing in large commercial aircraft parts, salvage and recovery.  Doug comes from the film and television entertainment field as a Director and Producer.  His previous film productions include Scrapping Aircraft Giants aired on the Discovery Channel.

Doug will discuss the book, Junkyard Jets, which he co-authored and published in 2010.  His talk will cover every step of the commercial aircraft recovery and salvage industry from airliner retirement and storage to dismantling and recycling.  Doug will also cover the many uses of retired aircraft from airframes for testing to use in the movies.

July 14, 2012 - Thomas Kewin & Sonja Vukasin

Thomas Kewin was born in Modesto, California in 1922.  After two years of engineering studies at Modesto College, he transferred to the Boeing School of Aeronautics, then located in what is now the Oakland Aviation Museum hangar.  WWII interrupted his studies, but was hired as a Flight Engineer by Pan American Airways in 1943, where he spent the next 40 years in that position.

Thomas is retired from Pan Am and currently lives with his wife in Mill Valley, California in the home he built in 1957.  In 2005, Thomas authored and published the book The Pan Am Journey.

Sonja Vukasin is the matriarch of the Peerless Coffee family of Oakland.  Prior to her marriage into the world of gourmet coffee, Sonja was a Pan Am Flight Attendant for many years.  She hails from a line of Pan Am alum, her father being a pilot for Pan American during the days of the famous “Clippers”.  Sonja continues to head the award winning Peerless Coffee Company where she has established a personal collection and museum around the Peerless and Pan Am history.

Thomas and Sonja will speak about their combined experiences with Pan Am over the years, as well as Sonja’s father’s experiences in the early days of Pan Am’s Pacific routes during the “Golden Age of Travel”.

August 18, 2012 – Jerry Whiting

Jerry Whiting was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but spent his high school years in Pleasant Hill, California.  He went on to obtained a bachelors degree in French from the University of California at Santa Barbara and later, a Master’s degree from John F. Kennedy University.

Jerry spent 25 years in law enforcement, serving as a Detective and senior hostage negotiator.  He also taught at the local police academy.  He traveled extensively, studying European policing in various countries and police techniques on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

In 1998, Jerry began working on a project about his dad’s experiences as an aerial gunner in Europe in WWII, culminating in the book, I’m Off to War, Mother, But I’ll Be Back.  Jerry’s second book about World War II, Don’t Let the Blue Star Turn Gold, was published in 2005. 

Jerry worked with producer Neil Looker as a subject interviewer on the documentary film Lives Beyond the War, about five WWII Vets living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He has since published Missions by the Numbers, Veterans in the Mist:  World War II Memoirs of the Third Thursday Lunch Bunch,  In the Shadow of Mt. Vulture  and New Year’s at Ramitelli;  A Safe Haven for Change.

Jerry was recently invited to provide training at the Pentagon to DPMO, which coordinates searches for American MIA’s from all wars.  He and his wife, Ann, live in Walnut Creek with their golden retriever, Barney.

September 15, 2012 – Faride Khalaf

Faride Khalaf began his aviation career as a skydiver in 1982.  He got his FAA A&P licenses from College of Alameda in 1985, and became an I/A in 2003.  He went on to be an Aircraft Mechanic Instructor at the late Sierra Academy in Oakland for several years beginning in 1986.  Additionally, Faride was a General Mechanic at United Airlines for a decade.  During two of those years, he was a Mechanic Instructor, teaching structural repairs, and for two years was a Fuel Systems Specialist.  Faride has been a private pilot for 24 years and is the sole owner of a 1947 Cessna 120.

Faride will be discussing the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  This sleek new airplane was designed with cutting edge technology in manufacturing and material science.  In this presentation, you’ll see colorful pictures that highlight the Dreamliner’s technical innovations as well as its’ great looks.  He will make comparisons with, and take a look at the technologies and the machinery of Boeing’s past!  Ultimately, Faride will offer a comprehensive mechanical prospective on the world’s most advanced jetliner.

October 20, 2012 – Craig Harwood

Craig Harwood is an independent consulting Engineering Geologist, PG, CEG in the Monterey and San Francisco Bay areas and adjacent coastal counties.  Craig conducts design phase geologic investigations and grading/remedial or construction grading phase inspections.

Craig’s interest in flight, particularly the subject of the early California aviation pioneer, John J. Montgomery, has also made him an aviation scholar and historian.  In 2010, Craig co-authored an article titled John J. Montgomery and the First Gliding Flights in America: 1884 - 1886, about the prolific scientific inventor and the principal aviation pioneer in the American west at the turn of the nineteenth century.   Montgomery, with his brother James, began his work in early aeronautic design at their ranch in here in Oakland in the latter half of the 1800s.

Craig’s follow-up book, Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West, slated for publication on October 9, 2012, continues the story.  It goes on to describe how at that time when many grappled with the seemingly impossible "problem of aerial navigation" Montgomery independently solved the problem of human controlled flight and served as unofficial dean to a community of California based aviation pioneers at that critical tipping point in the race to conquer the skies.

BOY SCOUT MODEL CONTEST

After a hiatus in 2011, OAM is proud to host the annual Boy Scout Model Contest in the hangar at 1:00pm on Saturday, March 31st.  This year the theme will be the Corsair F4U.  Judging will be based on historical information, accuracy and model detail.