Neil Armstrong learned to fly over the Wapakoneta farmland visible from the pattern at KAXV
Neil Armstrong held a student pilot's license at sixteen, a year before a driver's license; a kid in Wapakoneta, Ohio, looking up at the same Auglaize County sky pilots circle today. Twenty-three years later he stepped onto another world. The Armstrong Air & Space Museum sits ten minutes from the airport that bears his name. Inside: the Gemini 8 capsule he flew, his Gemini and Apollo spacesuits, an Apollo 11 moon rock, and the Aeronca Champion he learned in; the F5D Skylancer he flew as a NASA test pilot greets you outside. Land at KAXV during the Summer Moon Festival each July and the whole town turns out for the anniversary of the first lunar footprint.