Hill Aerospace Museum: The Base That Kept America Flying
Near Ogden, Utah
Hill Air Force Base takes its name from Major Ployer Peter Hill, a test pilot who died in nineteen thirty-five when Boeing's experimental Model Two Ninety-Nine crashed at Wright Field in Ohio. That prototype became the B-seventeen Flying Fortress, and the base named for its first test pilot spent World War Two maintaining and supplying the very aircraft that killed him.
The base opened in nineteen forty as a depot maintenance and supply facility, a kind of enormous repair shop and warehouse behind the front lines. Rather than building combat aircraft, Hill Field specialized in keeping them flying, overhauling engines, rebuilding airframes, and moving parts to theaters of war across the Pacific and Europe. At its wartime peak the base employed tens of thousands of workers, many of them women doing precision mechanical work that had been exclusively male territory before the war.
After the war Hill transitioned to the newly independent Air Force and took on additional roles in the Cold War. It became a key node in the SAGE air defense network in the late nineteen fifties, housing one of the computerized command-and-control systems designed to coordinate interceptor jets against Soviet bombers. Alert hangars at the west end of the runway kept fighters on five-minute ready notice throughout the Cold War decades.
The Hill Aerospace Museum opened in nineteen eighty-seven inside a World War Two warehouse on the base. The outdoor park and indoor galleries hold more than seventy historic aircraft, from a three-quarter scale replica of the Wright Flyer to B-seventeen and B-twenty-nine bombers to Cold War-era fighters and missiles. Admission is free. The museum draws more than two hundred sixty-five thousand visitors a year, making it one of the most visited military aviation museums in the American West.
