Travel: Flying High in Idaho

Inside Bird Aviation Museum.

(Frederick E. Allen)

Forrest Bird first flew a plane solo in 1935, when he was 14, and he hasn’t stopped yet. Serving in World War II he got frustrated that he couldn’t fly higher, so he invented breathing equipment that gave him (and the U.S. Army Air Force) another 9,000 feet. After the war he got an M.D. and started inventing breathing devices to save lives on the ground. He has invented ever since, and with the fortune he has made, he has bought airplanes. This month he opened the Bird Aviation Museum and Invention Center in a hangar at his personal airport in northern Idaho. It’s an unusual museum, a reflection of one very unusual man—and it’s a step into the world of a James Bond movie.

Five miles south of Sandpoint, Idaho, not too far from the Canadian border, you turn off the highway and drive down 12 miles of winding road through lush hills of pine and fir and open fields with views to distant mountains. Then you take a twisting private drive up a steep forested hillside. At the crest of the hill, in a clearing, you arrive at two airplane hangars. One of them holds the museum. Walk past them, and you encounter two more hangars. A long, curving taxiway descends beyond them to a broad sloping meadow with a runway cutting across it, in front of a view of miles of glacial Lake Pend Oreille far below and all the mountains beyond. Just being there, on top of the world in a hidden one-man airport with its own fleet of planes and staff to maintain them, you almost expect to meet the next Auric Goldfinger.

There is no danger of that. Forrest Bird is a truly benign character. He has long been known not only for his medical advances but for keeping his planes, no matter how old, in better condition than when they came out of the factory, and the first thing you notice when you enter the museum is how perfect all the craft displayed are. And they’re not only planes. You see, for instance, a bright red 1927 Waco GXE-10 biplane; a 1940 Stearman updated with a 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine and an enclosed canopy; a 1947 Republic RC-7 Sea Bee souped up with a supercharged Lycoming powerplant. You also see a 1928 Model A Ford, a ’48 Chrysler Windsor, a ’50 GMC Suburban, more than 50 models of historic planes, a lineup of World War II uniforms, a display about women and the home front.

But none of that is the heart of the museum. A room on one side has a couple of actual cockpit simulators where kids can take off and land. And a gallery next to that honors many inventors Bird counts among his friends. (Disclosure: I’ve gotten to know Bird myself, as I serve on the board of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, where he’s an inductee, and I took part in the museum’s opening, giving a talk at a celebratory dinner.) The selection of inventors on display is as idiosyncratic and personal as that of planes and cars. You learn on the one hand about Marcian “Ted” Hoff, inventor of the microprocessor, and see one of the original Intel 4004 computer chips, and about Robert Rines, a father of microwave technology, and see one of his first machines. On the other hand, you also learn how Robert Cade, M.D., originated Gatorade and Edward Lowe gave the world Kitty Litter and Tidy Cat (and you see an actual bag of each).

Forrest and Pamela Bird, with, at left, the aerobatic aviator Patty Wagstaff, who performed on opening day.

(Frederick E. Allen)

There’s a point to that, though. The aim of the museum is to promote invention and also entrepreneurship, especially among the young. Bird’s wife, Pamela Riddle Bird, who led the effort to get the museum designed, built, stocked, and opened, says, “It’s all about inspiration. If we can change just one kid’s life, and help give the world one future inventor, we will have succeeded in everything we’re trying to do here. It’s about preserving Forrest’s legacy, but it’s even more about tomorrow.”

The most inspirational section of the museum is the one about Bird himself, up a flight of stairs in a room overlooking the main gallery of planes and cars. One guest at the opening observed that there have been museums about aviation and museums about invention and museums about medicine, but this is the only one about all three, because only one man has brought all three together. Bird’s long career has ricocheted among those fields, his advances in one leading to improvements in another. After he got his medical degree, in the late 1940s, a friend’s father was diagnosed with emphysema. Bird adapted his cockpit demand regulator into a breathing apparatus for the man, and he ended up building the device by the thousands.

Later on another friend suggested he invent something to help premature babies breathe easier. That led to his best-known creation, the BABYbird respirator, partly adapted from technology he had developed to balance the pressure in the cabin of a Learjet. That was such a radical breakthrough that at first it could be tried only on babies who were sure to die. Not only did they start to live, but the survival rate for premature babies in respiratory distress went from about 30 percent to over 90 percent. In 1964 Bird’s then wife, Mary, was diagnosed with pulmonary emphysema. He developed a whole series of devices to assist her, and she lived way beyond anyone’s expectation, until 1986.

The Bird room contains more than a dozen showcases full of his inventions. Some of the early ones look like complicated versions of old gas masks; the newest are sleek and high-tech. His specific innovations are detailed on the walls, and they include not only breathing apparatus but also helping originate the first helicopter IC transport and the first intercontinental medevac plane.

At 86 Forrest Bird is a mass of ebullient energy. “It will be a very sad day when I stop flying,” he says. “And I don’t know how I’d stop inventing, either.” If you’re in the area, visit the museum. While you’re there, you may very well see Bird himself. His home is a mile or so away, at the edge of the lake, where he keeps the headquarters of his Percussionaire Corporation and his helicopters and helipad and boats. But he’s up around the museum and the airstrip constantly. He flies every day, picking out one of his twenty or so planes and helicopters for a cruise through the Idaho sky. He’s the tall man, six foot four, with flip-up eyeglasses, straight-backed and generally smiling, deciding whether today he’ll take out the Super Decathlon, the Skymaster II, the Grove Motor Glider, or one of the copters. He’s the one everybody calls “Doc.”

The Bird Aviation Museum and Invention Center, near Sandpoint, Idaho, is open Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. mid-May through mid-October. Admission is free. For more information visit www.birdaviationmuseum.com.

—Frederick E. Allen is the editor of AmericanHeritage.com. He is also the managing editor of American Heritage magazine and the editor of the quarterly American Heritage of Invention & Technology.