Exploring the WACO Air Museum: A Treasure Trove of Aviation History

So the first thing we need to talk about is the name.

So growing up reading old books, we would say Waco, but it's not.

It's Waco, like taco.

Great T-shirt for that.

We're going to get it later.

But this is the first hangar of the little museum here in Troy, Ohio.

And it just tells the story of the start of the company, which interestingly, this is not the original site of the company, which is actually up the road now and is part of Collins Aerospace.

But they just have a fantastic collection of bits and pieces.

So Francis Asius was the vice president, so there's his desk and things.

And they've got a partially restored one of their cabin planes, the YKS-6, which we'll have a look at in a second.

But the company founded in the 20s and didn't exactly explode onto the scene like some of the others.

And that's why they are a really cool outfit to come and look at.

But let's have a look at the cabin plane.

Well, actually, what we'll do is we'll go over here first.

Because up the road at Collins is where Waco were situated.

And we'll get to the CG-4 in a second.

But there were some lovely pictures of the factory floor in here, which I can't find.

But they basically just have kept a lot of the memory of the workers going in the museum.

There we go.

So that's the original plant up the road, now part of Collins Aerospace.

And built a range of aircraft.

So from early monoplanes for training through to aircraft like the one behind us, which was biplane cabin plane.

So saying that similar sort of market to, say, the stagger wing and things like that.

So what they've done is taken their YKA-6 five-seater biplane aircraft, about 225 horsepower Jacobs engine up the front.

And what you can do is you can climb in and have a play, my love.