![]() The museum campus sports three buildings: a theater, a wing for more modern aircraft, spacecraft and the SR-71 Blackbird, and the structure that houses the Hughes Flying Boat. With its 322-foot wingspan, the Spruce Goose is the star of the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. For the record, the Spruce Goose wingspan bests the C-5 by approximately 97 feet, and the tail of the wooden behemoth is over 100 feet tall. Up until that moment, the largest airplane I had been physically close to was a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy that Dad had taken me to see when I was a kid. On Friday, November 4, 2022, I was back, and face to face with one of the most iconic and impressive feats of aeronautical engineering ever achieved. The museum was in the excavation stage, and I stood in the 7-foot deep pit that had been dug to hold the hull of the behemoth aircraft. At the time, the Spruce Goose was across the street in pieces, shrink-wrapped and waiting for installation. ![]() The last time I was inside the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, was 20 years ago, when the facility was under construction. Not terribly poetic, I know, but it was from the heart. Those were the first words out of my mouth when I laid eyes on the Hughes Flying Boat, aka the Hercules, colloquially known as the Spruce Goose.
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