Garden City, New York: Cradle of Aviation Museum

There's something of interest for everyone, cockpits to sit in, cool memorabilia, models and tons of historic tidbits you never knew before.

The Apollo 13 Lunar Module (LM) was the lifeboat that brought its astronauts safely back to Earth. At the Cradle of Aviation Museum one of the docents (a retired Grumman Aerospace engineer) showed me the tongue-in-check "towing invoice" that Grumman sent to the contractors of the crippled Command Service Module. The story the docent told me was that Grumman got paid every time the LM performed a scheduled event (e.g., fired a rocket) and since the LM wasn't used to land on the Moon, Grumman wasn't going to get paid. So the joke invoice was sent to recover some of the money. NASA decided that it would be lousy publicity to stiff the makers of the craft that saved the astronauts' lives, so they eventually paid Grumman.

Contains Lm-19, never finished, and Lm-18, one of only three completed lunar landers still on earth. It also contains dozens of planes, some hung from the ceiling, and some cut in half for your perusal. Hundreds of models, but they aren't as much fun as peeking through the cabin door or cockpit to see the instrument panels of fighter jets and passenger planes.