Spiritual experiences seldom happen in the middle of the day. Our minds are too awake to be open to the subtleties that elevate normal occurrences into that realm. The half light of dawn with pinks and yellows and sleepy eyes is good, but the best time is the middle of the night. It is often a time when you are still up, but your mind went to bed hours ago. Think of a dark, clear night, after the day's warmth has cooled. The air is thickened by a gossamer mist that is set aglow by the lights of civilization.

It happened to me once again last week, on a night when I had been at the airport for an already unhealthy amount of time. I had just finished with my work, and was thinking of how I was almost too tired to go home when my attention was drawn to the F-4 Phantom jet that had just been delivered to the Warplane Museum. "They were so beautiful to watch" I thought to myself as I started walking across the parking area.

I listened to my footsteps as I walked, and watched the gray Navy fighter jet grow bigger in the mist. The F-4 was one of the great fighter jets that was designed in the late fifties and produced through the sixties. It had two big engines buried within the fuselage, and in a night takeoff would produce twin trails of fire all the way down the runway and into the sky. In less than one short minute the deafening roar would gradually subside as the plane accelerated into the distance, and shortly the two afterburners would wink out, signaling the end of the show.

They always struck me as a brawny plane, capable of both delivering and receiving bigger hits than other fighters of their time. The fuselage has a bulkiness to it, yet it also has the sinuous "coke bottle" curve at its midsection that reduces supersonic drag. I tried to imagine that this plane was just one plane of a squadron, and thought of all the machinery and the flurry of activity that was necessary to get them under way.

After walking a reverent circle around the F-4, I walked in front of the B-17. Unlike the F-4, this airplane still flies. Many times I have watched as each of the four engines is started, one at a time, each one coughing to life with a trail of smoke and then settling into the distinctive rumble of a big radial engine. The F-4 is impressive in the way that it burns its way into the air, but the B-17 shows a lady- like grace as its wings lift it off of the runway after a short takeoff roll. One airplane flies by the might of its engines, while the other flies by the grace of its wings.

A DC-3 was parked in the grass next to the B-17, and I quietly saluted the queen of the skies as I walked past her. This was the airplane that revolutionized air transportation, the plane that flew efficiently enough to make a profit on passenger flights without the subsidy of an air mail contract. A product of the 1930s, they were workhorses in several wars and were on airline rosters through the sixties. Many still make revenue flights in all parts of the world today.

The DC-3 airframe was so light that there was consideration of making an engineless glider version of them during WW-2. After 50 years the airframes are still so strong that some DC-3s are being refitted with turbo- prop engines. From where I stood, the plane blocked the harsh white lights of Consumer Square in the background so that it was illuminated in silhouette by the mists. A mantle for the Queen.

I started to walk back towards our hangar, past the F-14 at the end of the row. I looked at it as I passed, and couldn't help but think of how it looked like it was going 500 MPH just sitting there in the night. Should I care to admit it, the F-14 makes the F-4 look as graceful as a bookend, but that will never happen. As I moved farther away I looked at both the F-14 and the DC-3 in the same view. Both are about the same size. I wondered how the designers of the 1930s would have envisioned a plane of that size which could travel at more than 1000 MPH.

I admire all these things mostly from a technician's point of view, but other people see and feel other things. As I walked away, I thought of an elderly couple that walked through our hangar and asked if they could look at the B-17 last summer. From our conversation, I learned that he had been a B-17 crew member over Europe. Like so many of the returning soldiers of the time, he completely turned his back on many memories of the war, and had not been near a B-17 in fifty years.

When they returned a short time later, he was visibly shaken, and she did most of the talking. She thanked me for letting them pass, and he nodded that they would be back again. I am anxious for the museum to be open to all, not just a lucky few who catch the right circumstances... or to trespassing mechanics who talk to airplanes in the middle of the night.

To contact Bob Tilden, send an e-mail.