What's to do on a chilly, drizzly day? Visit another museum. So we made the treck out to the Flugwerft Schleissheim, an outpost of the Deutsche Museum we've frequented a few times in the past months. The "Flugwerft" is the old airfield of the Bavarian Airforce established in 1912 just in time for our first foray into establishing ourselves as the really bad guys of the 20th century. The place is a bit like the set for "Operation Valkyrie" with the naziesque airport buildings, sinister forests and all, but since it's mainly a science and technology museum Karl was all into it.
I was again kinda surprised how unfiltered and unapologetic those Deutsches Museum curator guys are into the military history of aviation though, which in Germany of course mostly means a swastika on the tailplane fin and/ or an Iron Cross on the side. Even the educational videos stretch the fact that the V1 and V2 rockets made it all the way to London in a more technical achievement way. Well, that excursion wasn't about my tastes. So Karl got to sit in some 1970s jet-fighter cockpit and no, I didn't tell him to go "strafe some gook village" as the warpaint on the fuselage suggested, but just pointed out the wide array of buttons, levers and instruments necessary to fly an airplane, not going into details like the red trigger or the bomb release. We ended up hanging out at the kids' flying circus, where children get to fly wooden model airplanes on a string in a kind of vaulting type setup. Also he likes helicopters better than planes he told me. So we better get him into the Harvard MBA program soon, so he can afford one.
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