by KYW's John Ostapkovich
If you like airplanes and history, there's a good match for you just a stone's throw from Wildwood, NJ. It's been there a long time, but is off the beaten path.
The Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation Museum is at hangar one of the Cape May County Airport. Various jet, propeller, fixed-wing and rotor aircraft are on display there.
Rutgers-Camden history professor Jeffrey Dorwart, who wrote a pamphlet on the history of the Naval Air Station, says many people don't recognize how critical the place was in training World War II carrier pilots, or the toll it took:
"We had about 40 pilots within a nine-month period that crashed their SBDs, their Dauntlesses, their Corsairs and so forth into Cape May County, into the Delaware shore and the Delaware Bay, and died."
On a lighter note, he points out that the original name of the airfield was NAS Rio Grande, named after another nearby town -- but their mail kept getting sent to Texas.
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