Noha307 wrote:
This whole situation sucks, but does anyone else get the feeling that it was kind of inevitable?
We have two large aviation museums at the same airport vying for the same audience. It seems like this going to come to a head at some point. The whole Yanks wanting to move to Greenfield that was
mentioned early in the thread suggests to me that they've wanted a location all to themselves for some time now. And don't forget that PoF has its own satellite campus at Valle Airport as well. I think the takeaway is that Chino was just "not big enough for the both of them". I mean look at a satellite view of their storage areas. They can't be any more cramped.
I'm going to say no, not inevitable.
Yes, space is tight on the field, although it wasn't 20 years ago, before they built all those hangars to the east. But the museums complement, they don't vy. I don't think many visitors to the field run out of time or money after visiting just one museum and can't afford to see the other. If they become aware of both, they'll go see both. Who doesn't want to see 5 Mustangs, 3 P-47s and 2 P-38s in one afternoon? Of course, the two museums don't cross-promote -- you don't see pamphlets for one in the lobby of the other. You don't see combo ticket deals. Right there, you get the feeling that some personal issues have always been in play. I have certainly heard staff of Yanks bad-mouth POF over the years, though not so much recently. It's like when you have two friends who have so much in common that they should totally get along, but they seem to hate each other over the most trivial of differences.
Duxford should be the model. They have a major flying museum, a major static museum, and several vintage aircraft related businesses on the field. Can you imagine IWM complaining that the airshows cause it cost and inconvenience? Yes you can! It's always easy to imagine people being jerks! But instead, they entered into a mutually beneficial partnership and made the airfield more of a destination that it could have been with either tenant alone.
August
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