Silent WIngs Museum D-Day 2022

Silent Wings Museum occupies the former terminal and tower of Lubbock’s mid-century airport, set on the ground once known as South Plains Army Air Field, where U.S. Army Air Forces glider pilots trained from 1942 to 1945. The site’s high plains climate, with its dry air, clear skies, and favorable lift, originally made it an efficient classroom for “silent” flight; today it frames a focused examination of the World War II glider program. At the core of the collection is a fully restored WACO CG-4A troop/cargo glider, reclaimed from a postwar life as rooftop advertising and painstakingly brought back to exhibition standard by veterans and enthusiasts who later formed the National World War II Glider Pilots Association. Alongside it, training aircraft, airborne equipment, and a reconstructed barracks environment situate the machines within their operational world. Ongoing restoration work on a British Horsa glider and the on-site Adams Research Library add a research dimension, turning this former training field on the Llano Estacado into a concentrated repository on the engineering, tactics, and fragile material legacy of combat gliders.