
USS Midway Museum
Decommissioned aircraft carrier turned floating museum, deck once cleared for a refugee family's desperate landing.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the USS Midway Museum in San Diego turns on the last day of April 1975, when a South Vietnamese pilot named Major Buang-Ly banked a tiny two-seat Cessna over the carrier's flight deck with his wife and five children crammed inside, and found no room to land. It follows the notes he dropped toward the deck and the decision facing Captain Lawrence Chambers, the first Black officer ever to command a US aircraft carrier, as helicopters worth millions sat in the way. Stand on that same deck and listen for what Chambers chose to do next.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Maritime Museum of San Diego
Iron-hulled tall ship from eighteen sixty-three, saved from the scrapyard and still sailing once a year.
Star of India (ship)
Iron-hulled sailing ship from 1863, still under sail as the world's oldest active windjammer.
San Diego Air & Space Museum
Aviation museum of historic aircraft and spacecraft, risen from a nineteen seventy-eight arson fire.
Liberty Station
Former naval training complex reborn as a waterfront district of galleries, restaurants and shops.
The San Diego Veterans Museum
Wartime Naval Hospital chapel, its pulpit once rotated among three faiths, now honoring veterans.
San Diego History Center
History museum inside a Balboa Park exposition hall rebuilt after a 1978 arson fire.