The artistic side of aviation is the theme of several new exhibits at the EAA AirVenture Museum. Your AirVenture gate pass includes admission to the air-conditioned EAA Museum and to Pioneer Airport. Free shuttle buses run all day between the museum and the AirVenture grounds.

For 25 years, artist/illustrator Barry Ross has created the illustrations for Flying Magazine’s monthly feature, "I Learned About Flying From That." A sampling of those illustrations is on display in the EAA Museum, adjacent to the Aerospace Design exhibit. Each evocative painting is accompanied by a capsule description of the magazine story it illustrated. The stories are sometimes hair-raising, sometimes humorous, and always instructive. Ross’ paintings evoke the thrill and wonder of flight; they capture the moment when the flight "went awry," yet they convey a hopeful sense that each adventure had a happy ending.

The Art of Survival, a new exhibit in the museum’s Eagle Hangar, features World War II aviation training posters, many of them humorous with a serious intent. World War II air crew survival kits and equipment are also part of this training exhibit.

A new hands-on exhibit gives kids of all ages a chance to explore some of the principles and artifacts of flight, from touching a moon rock to measuring g-forces on a centrifuge. The exhibit is located on the museum’s mezzanine, overlooking the SpaceShipOne exhibit.

Also on the mezzanine is a unique and fascinating exhibit of "odds and ends" from the museum’s collections. There you’ll see such oddities as teletype printouts from NASA’s Apollo missions, a 1960s high-altitude helmet and g-suit, a coconut from Pearl Harbor—the site of the aerial attack that brought the United States into World War II—and a historic collection of military and civilian pilot wings. Alan Westby, director of collections and interpretation explained:

"We have a lot of interesting and historically significant ‘stuff’ in the museum’s collection that doesn’t really fit into any other exhibit. And we thought it might be interesting to just display some of it. So [Curator of Collections] Ron Twellman went through the collection and selected some of the most interesting and esoteric artifacts, and we put them all together, and it has turned out to be a really popular exhibit."

As always, the museum is home to more than 90 aircraft, including vintage, homebuilt, and military aircraft—from a pristine Ryan SCW-145 classic sport plane, to a restored de Havilland Mosquito, to the one-of-a-kind 1939 Bugatti Model 100 racer. And the museum’s Boeing Aeronautical Library is open to visitors.