McCarran's hidden treasure

Aviation museum's displays are spread across three valley airports

Dale Dombrowski/ViewPart of the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum is housed at McCarran International Airport, while the North Las Vegas and Henderson airports have other exhibits. The Gift of Lights returns to Sunset Park, 2601 E. Sunset Road, celebrating the holidays with light displays sponsored by area businesses. The display takes about 20 minutes to drive through. Holiday music is broadcast through an in-park channel throughout the drive. The event costs $13 per vehicle, with $2 discounts available with a donation of gently used clothing items that benefit Goodwill. A portion of the proceeds from the event assist the Clark County Scholarship Fund. The Gift of Lights is open from 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday through Jan. 1.photos by Marlene Karas/View Advertisement

If your travel plans this holiday season take you to McCarran International Airport, you'll have the opportunity to visit the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum. It's likely that nearly everyone reading this already has been to museum, but it's also just as likely that the vast majority didn't realize it. This is because although the museum is, according to director Mark Hall-Patton, Nevada's most visited museum, it also is one of the least accessible, with exhibits located inside three valley airports.

The museum is spread out across McCarran -- situated above the baggage claim, in the corridors to various gates, across from the ticket counters, and even in Terminal 2. It's the museum's location in the state's busiest airport that qualifies it as perhaps the most visited museum in the valley. Ironically, it's also this very location that makes it so difficult to see in its entirety.

Post-9/11 security measures preclude unticketed visitors from passing into gate areas, which house many of the museum's displays, and there currently is little interconnectivity between the gates. This will change slightly come this summer, according to McCarran spokesman Chris Jones.

"A bridge is currently under construction that will connect the A and B gates to C gate," Jones said. "This will make it easier for people with connecting flights, as they won't have to walk out and back in through security to change gates."

This also will mean that passengers who want to see the entire museum will be able to, or at least see most of it.

"There are exhibits in both the North Las Vegas and Henderson airports," Hall-Patton said. "They are part of the same museum."

This means that the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum has exhibits that are approximately 20 miles apart. The museum also has a traveling exhibit that goes to places such as Searchlight, Jean and Overton, and as far as California.

The museum was founded 14 years ago when the airport expanded south, necessitating the removal of Peg Crockett's home. Peg Crockett had been, with her husband, George, one of the original owners of Alamo Airport, which is now McCarran. While she was preparing to move, Peg Crockett decided to donate her collection of artifacts relating to the early history of the airport. Robert Broadbent, who was at the time Clark County Director of Aviation, worked out a deal with the Clark County Department of Parks and Recreation for a museum to be funded by the Department of Aviation, but operated by parks and recreation.

Eventually, the museum was installed and was named after Howard W. Cannon, a four-term U.S. senator from Nevada who was a pilot during World War II and was shot down behind enemy lines. He and his co-pilot avoided capture for six weeks until Allied forces liberated the area.

Oddly enough, the airport that houses the majority of the museum is named after another U.S. senator from Nevada, Pat McCarran. "If people have heard of McCarran," Hall-Patton said, "it's often in connection to the McCarran Act."

The McCarran Act was a piece of Cold War legislation aimed at ferreting out communists.

Obviously, it isn't that rather infamous bit of legislation that warrants the naming the airport after him. "Pat McCarran was the first native-born senator from Nevada," Hall-Patton said. "Honestly, he was a bit of a fascist, but he was also extraordinarily important for commercial aviation in the United States.

"He did a lot for commercial aviation," Hall-Patton said, "setting up funding bills from the federal government, so municipalities could build or improve their airports."

Likewise, it isn't primarily Cannon's wartime experience that justified naming the museum after him, noted Hall-Patton, but rather the fact that he passed the bill that deregulated U.S. airports. This allowed competition and the benefits of a free market, including lower fares and increased flights. Within five years of the passage of the deregulation act of 1978, the number of airlines operating out of McCarran boomed from five to 17.

"Between McCarran and Cannon, you have two people who did more to create commercial aviation as we know it today than anyone else," Hall-Patton said. "And they're both from Nevada."

There are, of course, challenges to operating such a unique museum. The museum is open 24 hours a day, year round. "Twenty-four-hour use is hard on electronics," Hall-Patton said. "We've done things to electronics that people tell us can't be done.

"If you're not careful you destroy artifacts, so the paper items in displays are reproductions."

The originals are kept in the collection. The harsh light eventually will deteriorate paper, Hall-Patton said. Fine art museums typically rotate works on paper, only showing one piece for a relatively short time.

The museum doesn't have its own building, and so it must make allowances for changes to the building the airport deems necessary. Any time a major exhibit is installed, it needs to be done in the wee hours of the morning when no flights are coming in. It also suffers from its relative anonymity. People do things there they might never do in a more traditional museum, Hall-Patton said. He said he has seen people change babies on the display cases, slam heavy suitcases on them, and drinks frequently are spilled on the cases, causing liquid to seep into the displays. Unthinking travelers actually have shattered the heavy, Plexiglas displays.

"Even for all the negatives, I would never want to move it," Hall-Patton said. "We can reach people here that you can't anywhere else. The positives outweigh the negatives.

"You've got numbers coming in that would never come in if it was two feet out the door -- 450,000 to 500,000 visitors a year stop and interact with the museum."

There are displays outlining the history of the various airports that have graced the valley, and the people who were influential in aviation here, whether it was in the air, on the field or in the government. There is a display recounting the tale of the old Hacienda's shuttle flights, which Hall-Patton notes brought more passengers in and out of the valley then many of the local airlines did. There also is an exhibit of the Flexible Gunnery School, which taught airplane gunners to shoot wildly moving targets from another wildly moving target in a training exercise called Operation Pinball, in which practice ammo burst into powder was fired at a plane outfitted with a light on the nose which lit up when gunners scored a hit.

The gunnery school also holds a unique position in the history of fashion. Some of the first logo T-shirts were created there, featuring the school's symbol, a cartoon of a winged horned toad firing a mounted machine gun from a cloud. A black and white photo at the museum shows a gunner proudly wearing the shirt. Prior to this time, people didn't wear T-shirts out. Back then, it was considered an undergarment, Hall-Patton said.

"If anyone ever comes up with one, we'd love to get it," he said of the shirt. "I've never seen an original."

In the A and B gate corridors, there are displays of uniforms of airline workers and one of Howard Hughes' own flight suits. There are several display cases full of model airplanes peppered around McCarran. All of them represent models and companies that actually were there at one time or another.

Two of the lesser-seen displays are model cases in the C gate corridors. One is on the back wall as you step off the tram. If you don't happen to turn left before you head right to the baggage claim, you'll miss it. The other is on the walkway to the terminal, which most people miss by taking the tram.

Two of the most striking pieces in the museum are located just to the north of the core collection on the second floor above the baggage claim -- a fire engine red '56 Thunderbird and a record-breaking small plane. A photo near them shows the two together in their heyday, the plane cruising mere feet off the ground as the car keeps pace in a publicity shot.

The car on display actually is a reproduction of the Alamo Airlines lead/crash wagon. A lead truck was used to guide planes around the tarmac and a crash wagon is a vehicle designed to rescue victims of a crash, a sort of ambulance and fire truck. Long after the Crocketts sold the airport, they continued to operate Alamo Airlines from it. The T-bird was a fixture around the airport. The original vehicle still exists; in fact, it recently was sold in an online auto auction, but the museum currently has no plans to try to acquire it.

"If they want to donate it, we'd take it," Hall-Patton said. "When there's some historic tie people tend to get somewhat exaggerated evaluations in their heads."

Hall-Patton explained that the airplane was the one used in the World Endurance Flight of 1958-'59. Bob Timm and John Cook took off on Dec. 4, 1958, and didn't touch the ground again for just short of 65 days. They flew in four-hour shifts, spending the nights circling near the Blythe California airfield, one of the only lighted ones in the area at the time.

It took two and a half years to hang the plane.

"I can give you a little bit of advice," Hall-Patton said, pointing to the plane. "Never scare a building inspector. If you tell them you're hanging an airplane over 20 million people a year, they get nervous. Any one of those cables up there will hold two airplanes, and there are six cables up there. It isn't going anywhere."

Among the unusual features of the museum is that Hall-Patton's office is 16 miles away at the Clark County Heritage Museum, 1830 S. Boulder Highway. The publications and videos the museum produces are available at the gift shop located there.

"I always thought how nice it would be to take a museum and put it where people were, rather than making them go to where the museum is," Hall-Patton said. "I never thought I'd get a chance to do that, and I've been doing it now for 14 years.

"As I was checking on the model plane exhibits the other day, I saw a little girl, who couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old, and she took off at a dead run from over there (around 100 feet away) with her mother on her heels trying to keep up. She got here and just stopped and said 'Wow!' That's when you know it's working," he said.