Welcome to your holiday edition of Plane Porn! This amazing display of holiday lights can be found at Denver's Wings Over The Rockies Air & Space museum. Here, we see a gigantic plane wrapped from nose to tail and wingtip to wingtip in holiday lights. This plane happens to be the venerable "BUFF" B-52.
Why's the nose red? Because of Rudolph, obviously. If you're ever visiting in Denver, or lucky enough to live here, I recommend visiting this museum. I'm told the B-52 is lit from dusk until 9:00PM during the holidays. I got to check out the inside of the museum, earlier this summer. The museum has a great collection of historic military aircraft, including a F-14 Tomcat, a B-1 Lancer, and a F-104 Starfighter, just to name a few.
Wings Over the Rockies is in the Lowry neighborhood, east of Denver. Lowry was the site of Lowry Air Force Base, established as an Air Corps technical school in 1938, whose original mission was aerial spy photography training. Lowry AFB was also the original site of the U.S. Air Force Academy from 1955 to 1958. Two of the base's original hangars still stand. One of those houses the Wings museum, while the other, known simply as Hangar 2 is being renovated and kept intact, thanks to its achievement of Historic Landmark status in 2011. It will house over 500 self storage units, plus over 6,000 square feet of retail space. The base was formally closed in 1994, after falling under the axe of the 1991 Base Realignment and Closure Commission.
After receiving over $9 million in pledges, Wings Over the Rockies just announced an expansion project, called "The Exploration of Flight" that will be housed at Centennial Airport, south of Denver. This location will be based on the science of flight, including aircraft and spacecraft technologies.
Have you seen any cool aviation-themed light exhibits over the holiday season? Share your photos of them with is here, in the comments below.
Top image via Paul Thompson.
Paul Thompson is a aviation journalist with over 13 years of experience working in the airline industry, who maintains the website Flight Club for Jalopnik.com. You can contact Paul to submit story ideas, your own "Plane Porn" photos, and comments regarding this or any other aviation topic via email at Paul@Jalopnik.com