Embark on a journey through aviation history at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, a cherished gem in Denver, Colorado. This episode of Pinpoint Colorado, hosted by Rachel Means, teams up with David Dickerson, President and CEO of the Museum, to unlock the rich tapestry of aviation evolvement and discovery site. From the historic aircraft to cutting-edge aerospace innovations, the museum offers more than just exhibits—it paves pathways to future careers in aviation and space along with educational programs that inspire and empower the next generation.
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00:00:43 Introduction to Pinpoint Colorado and Wings Over the Rockies
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SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Pinpoint Colorado. I’m your host, Rachel Means. Today, I’m at Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver, Colorado’s official air and space museum. This remarkable space features over 100,000 square feet of exhibits. This is a place where families, history lovers, and future pilots can step into the story of flight and aviation. Coming up, I’ll be joined by President and CEO, David Dickerson. Well, thank you, David, for being here. I know you’re a busy guy, and just taking the time to be on Pinpoint really means a lot.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER 02 :
I had not heard about this, and this is a treasure, for sure, a gem in Colorado.
SPEAKER 01 :
It truly is.
SPEAKER 02 :
How long has this been open?
SPEAKER 01 :
Gosh, WINGS started in 1994, so actually 32 years now. But where we’re sitting is in the middle of our number one hangar, the former Lowry Air Force Base, which was actually built in 1937. And it was decommissioned in the early 90s, and the Lowry Redevelopment Authority took over, and we were fortunate enough to be able to create Colorado’s first official air and space museum right here.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow, so obviously this is a great family event for people. Kids love this, I’m sure. And you give tours as well?
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, absolutely. We have tours every day. We’re open seven days a week, typically, except on Sundays from 10 to 5, Sundays from 12 to 5. And we have docents here, many of which are veterans. Almost 90% of our docents are veterans and who flew many of the aircraft that you see here. So they’re fascinating to talk to and give great tours. this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, kids love, well, trains, airplanes, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 02 :
And anything to do with space as well. What’s your favorite piece on the property? That’s probably hard.
SPEAKER 01 :
It is a very hard question. You know, we have historic aircraft like the B-18 Bolo, which is fantastic, and the F-104 Vietnam aircraft. I’d have to, my son’s an F-18 pilot in the Navy, so I’d have to say our F-14 Tomcat’s pretty darn special.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you must be proud.
SPEAKER 01 :
Very proud of him. Yeah. And he started here as a Wings kid. I started bringing him here when he was six years old. So it’s kind of neat to see it come full circle.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because you are kind of, you know, training up the next generation. A kid can come here and be like, this is what I want to do.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely. And the thing I’m most proud of is… When I was a kid, if you were a pilot and that was your involvement in aviation, now there’s any number of careers in aviation, from pilot to maintainer to designer to engineer. We even have a young lady, a daughter of one of our staff members, who is designing textiles for spacecraft. Fascinating. And so there’s so many career paths, and that’s fascinating. Helping people launch that career, realize that there’s those paths and then launching them is something that’s very important to us. We are so much more than a museum. Museums kind of conjure up images of dusty old artifacts sitting around. And we certainly have artifacts. They’re not dusty. And we have our collection, our cultural collection here. But we also have a strong education program and we have a strong community outreach program as well, both of which are extremely important. We have an inflatable planetarium that we take to schools all along the Front Range and teach astronomy. to students. We teach rocketry, robotics. Our Wings Aerospace Education program, we have 95 students here, middle and high schoolers, that come and they learn robotics, they learn drones, they can actually get their FAA 107, which is your drone license, here as part of their normal school. It’s really, again, so much more than just a museum.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, you guys offer a lot.
SPEAKER 01 :
We’re very fortunate in that regard. And really, it’s due to we have a tremendous staff, educators, historians, and fundraising people, of course. So every museum needs those. But the staff here is really fantastic and terribly involved in everything that we do.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, you guys are doing a great job.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
When someone comes for a tour here, how long typically does the tour take?
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, I always recommend that you allow at least two hours, but we have people that come and stay all day. We have restaurants actually adjacent to the facility here, some really good ones, and have lunch. You can actually sit up on our patio upstairs and looking out over our B-52 and then come back in and do some more. You can easily spend a whole day here, but two hours minimum is what I always recommend.
SPEAKER 02 :
I see so many cool pieces. Are we allowed to climb up on any of them and touch and feel?
SPEAKER 01 :
We have open cockpit days once a month on a Saturday, and we have pilots who flew the aircraft beside them, and we let people up to the cockpits to look inside.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
With the educational programs, are you tied to schools, or how does that work?
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, about half of our students are homeschool students. I’m sorry, that was R2-D2 you heard in the back.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, I’m going to have to go check that out.
SPEAKER 01 :
we have an x-wing fighter and r2d2s in the back and he talks every now and then so um the high school and middle schoolers about half are homeschooled and have come from public schools and they get permission from their staff to come here for specific classes related to aerospace wow what is the number one thing that you hope besides you know maybe a kid who’s going to go and you know be in the industry what is some other things you hope people leave with when they when they leave here You know, a sense of heritage, a sense of Colorado’s place in aviation history. You know, more astronauts come from Colorado than any other state.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I did not know that.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s pretty fascinating. We have more than 2,000 aerospace companies in Colorado. Our next moon mission, Artemis II, which will launch in April, the capsule and the boosters are built here by Lockheed Martin. The rover is being built here. That’ll be a part of Artemis IV. There’s a lot going on here. Boom Supersonic is building the first supersonic airliner out at Centennial Airport. There’s a tremendous amount of aerospace activity in this state. And And certainly you learn about that here, but it’s also important to remember where you came from. So seeing some of our Vietnam era aircraft, for example, or our World War II aircraft, it gives you a sense of place and those that came before you. And I think that’s really important in aerospace.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and just in general to know our history as a state, but as a nation, and then the history of aviation itself is important.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s fascinating.
SPEAKER 02 :
In some ways, you know, kids are missing that. We’re on our devices, we’re watching television, we’re on the internet a lot, but to actually have an experienced family or with friends to come here and be able to see it and touch it is very, very important.
SPEAKER 01 :
extremely important. We’re really big on getting off your screens and touching and feeling. And again, listening to some of the stories here, we have one of our veterans flew 253 combat missions in Vietnam in one of the aircraft we have on display here in our Vietnam era section. And just being able to hear him and relate to that, it’s totally different than reading about it. And so that’s one of the experiential component is very important here at WINGS.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, and be able to shake the hand of a hero who served. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s huge.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, they’re fascinating people, and I never get tired of the stories, and we never seem to hear the same story twice, which is great.
SPEAKER 02 :
Do you have a particular story that’s not too long that you can share?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, if you know me for long, my stories are a bit long. I can tell you about my son. I mentioned he’s my oldest. He started over here. We have a little device called Trap the Cat, where you actually get to practice landing an aircraft on an aircraft carrier. Wow. He started doing that when he was six or seven years old. Now he’s landing airplanes on aircraft carriers for real. Yeah. And whenever I see a young person over there playing with Trap the Cat, I have videos of my son’s name is Brooks. I have videos of Brooks landing on board the Lincoln. And I’ll always say, well, this is what it’s like in real life.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you can just see the light bulb go off. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
I can do this, too.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s exciting. When you tour the facility, besides the touch and feel and you get to learn, is there anything else in particular that’s a little bit unique besides just seeing the planes themselves? Oh, sure. Because I see over here, and I don’t know if we have it on camera, but there’s like a little interactive thing back there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, we have the Wright Brothers exhibit. We have simulators here. You can actually fly the Wright Flyer. It’s a simulator. And just like Wilbur and Orville, you lay down on it and you get 20 seconds of fuel, which is pretty much what they had at Kill Devil Hill. And you can actually fly that sim and see what it was like to fly the Wright Flyer back in 1912.
SPEAKER 02 :
For people who want to come and tour, but they also want to support you guys, how can we support what you’re doing here?
SPEAKER 01 :
Gosh, become a member is a wonderful way. You can go to our website, wingsmuseum.org, and donate directly to our website. We have a number of events every year that you can participate in. We just finished Astronomy Night at our Centennial location. We had 13 different astronomy clubs that night to see the planet parade. So there’s always something going on almost every weekend. And so just by going to our website, you can participate there. And again, we love members. Members have special benefits here and get VIP access to certain events and things. We have our annual gala every year, which is another big event for us. We’ll have this year, we’re honoring the Air Force Thunderbirds. And I expect we’ll have around 700 people here that night.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
So.
SPEAKER 02 :
Sounds fun. Is it held here?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, right here at Lowry. Last year, I don’t know if you can see our Harrier in the background. That’s our first Marine Corps aircraft. We dedicated that last year. The Marines have a birthday every year. They’re the only branch of service that have, they celebrate their birthday every year on November the 9th. This year was the 250th birthday of the Marine Corps, and so we celebrated it here. We had about 650 Marines that night, and we dedicated our Harrier, which had just arrived, and we had roughly 21 Harrier pilots with us that evening. So it was very special, but open to the public.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is something that it’s just you’re supporting the heritage and you’re supporting, you know, if you’re a patriot, you’re supporting the heroes. And so a lot of you look into the future.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, you’ve seen you saw some of our spacecraft when you came in a few weeks ago. We had Artemis to Family Day here. Had some eleven hundred people on Monday. All the equipment manufacturers that are building parts of the spacecraft were here. to talk to people, talk to taxpayers, tell them about their programs. And it was a fascinating chance to get up close and personal. Nature and science brought a comet that people could touch. We have a moon rock here that you can see that our astronauts from Apollo 15 brought back for us. Wow. So lots to see and do.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I want to go see the moon rock for sure after this interview. There’s two locations. So is there a difference between the two? This is, you know, a special location, but just kind of describe. So I could foresee, you know, a family day here and then the next weekend or the next month, you know, planning to go to the other location.
SPEAKER 01 :
So we call this our historical repository because the aircraft here are historic. They don’t get to fly. At one time, this was an Air Force base and they did fly. But now they’re static and you can get up close and touch them. At Centennial, you can also get up close and touch, but you’re touching real aircraft that just flew in that day. Right. We have aircraft in our hangar there. It’s an active hangar. It’s a rotating collection of aircraft that come and go. We have fly-in days. Second Saturday of every month is our breakfast fly-in. Oh, that’d be fun. Oh, it’s great fun. We have 14 or 15 aircraft that will typically come in, helicopters too, and we serve breakfast. And it’s a wonderful chance for visitors to interact with the airplanes, get up close and touch them. And the best thing about our Centennial location is that most airports are – highly secure areas and by design and you can’t really get in, so to speak. By buying a ticket to Wings at our Centennial location, you can walk out our hangar doors onto the aircraft ramp and stand 100 feet away from a landing aircraft and see what that’s like. And then talk to the pilot when he taxis up and ask him about his airplane. It’s a great place. So it’s a really nice balance between historic and active.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right. Got to check out both for sure.
SPEAKER 01 :
Please. Absolutely.
SPEAKER 02 :
And just go to the website and check that out.
SPEAKER 01 :
And we always have events, like I said, second Saturday fly-ins, open cockpit days, special nights or special events that are going on. The museum at night is a lot of fun, I have to tell you. So when you see those evening events, they’re always fun to come to.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Well, this is just a treasure. And I wasn’t too familiar with this place. But now I’m like, I got to check out some of this stuff. And the breakfast is very intriguing to me. I’ll have to check that out.
SPEAKER 01 :
They make really good bacon.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I’m in. I’m in. Well, thank you so much for taking time out to share with us about this very special place. And we’ll hope to be back to and book another interview in the future just to learn more. I have so many more questions.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you so much for taking the time.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you. My thanks to David Dickerson and team at Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum for sharing this incredible place with me today. You can learn more and plan your visit at wingsmuseum.org. And don’t forget to stop on by pinpointcolorado.com to watch past episodes. Thanks for joining me and see you next time.
