Best Tourism On Hawaii

[Bill Greenwood]

What tours or interest points would a pilot or EAA person enjoy seeing on Oahu with its miltary history?
There is the well known visit to the sunken hull of the Arizona,, with the only problem that it is hard to see with it underwater. But a vistor is there where the attack happened with the power of that feeling.
And a bus can take you to Ford Island to the new aviation museum there, and again where it actually happened. I just wish the runway was still active or at least maintained as it was then, it should be kept that way but the control tower and hangars are still there. A battleship is part of one tour, USS Missouri
As for as I know there is not a boat tour that covers all of Pearl Harbor, and I think there should be.
The best tour we had was an hour flight in a De Haviland Beaver on floats the covered the whole island and the final leg was to come in from the north shore retracing the route that the attacking planes came in, past Wheeler army base, and to the harbor and Hickam Field. This was a special flight, and perhaps a pilot could also rent a plane and do the flight themselves, but it is nice to have someone else flying while one does the looking.

[CarlOrton]

Did you take the Ford Island tour? We did in 2012; was quite interesting, but most of the efforts inside the hangar were geared toward restoration projects underway. Not knocking it, but was more emphasis on the current rather than the historical.

I thought it was notable and noble that the bullet holes in the glass doors of the hangar were still there. It provided a bit of a "you are there" moment, for me at least.

Not too many GA airports on Oahu. I believe no more than two, but it's been years since I looked at a digital sectional of the island.

[Bill Greenwood]

Yes , Carl we went to Ford Island. In some ways there is more to see there than other places, however the Arizona is special because of those lost aboard her and nearby, even if not as much to see.
And the museum at Ford Island has a nice snack bar, makes a good lunch spot. You can pretty much see these two sites in half a day.

[FlyingRon]

I didn't have any problem seeing the Arizona from the memorial. If you go over to the hangar where the Pacific Air Museum has their workshops, the windows there still have bullet holes from the attack. The museum also amused me as one of the exhibits was surrounded with barbed wire. I pointed out to the (then) director of education there that the Smithsonian hadn't come up with this idea yet. She told me to go ahead and touch it. It turns out that the barbs (very realistic looking) were, in fact, made of rubber.

One word of advice to those wanting to go to the Arizona. There's often over an hour wait for a departure time. Get your tickets as soon as you arrive (there's a small museum there at the dock that you can kill time with as well as food available). You can't take the food with you so plan accordingly.

The oil in the Arizona tanks is still dripping to the surface and will for quite some time to come.

[FlyingRon]

As for the rest of Oahu, the first thing I'd do is skip Honolulu itself. There's nothing there frankly that you can't have in any California city (or just about any major US city). There, however, were some good restaurants. There's also a touristy Dole pineapple plantation you can visit.

We drove up to the north shore and had some good food and sites there and then drove down the coast on the east side. Some pretty spectacular wave action as well.

There's a neat "blowhole" in the rocks in an overlook just north of Honolulu. My picture doesn't quite do it justice.

[FlyingRon]

f course, Oahu is only a tiny fragment of Hawaii. I spent more of my time over on the "Big Island" of Hawaii. We stayed in Kona but traveled all over the island (been there twice). I've circumnavigated the coast and gone across the middle (between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa) a few times. Once it was so foggy, I thought I had lost the cars I was following but when we descended out of the cloud bank we were only thirty feet or so behind them.

Here's one of the volcanic cauldrons:

[rwanttaja]

I didn't have any problem seeing the Arizona from the memorial.

Landlubbers like me and Bill tend to forget one thing: The tide. Visit near high tide, and little is visible on the surface. Low tide, and one of the aft turret rings is visible. My first visit was probably near high tide, didn't see much. My second visit, I saw a lot more. Also, much of the ship isn't that visible from the memorial due to the slanting sight lines and reflectivity of the water.

Here's a 3D model showing Arizona as she currently rests:

The aft turret ring I mentioned is the one sticking up on the left side (stern). The memorial itself lies athwartships just forward of the ring. So the details near the bow are much deeper and have to be viewed through a lot of water if one is on the memorial.

The oil in the Arizona tanks is still dripping to the surface and will for quite some time to come.

Arizona had something like a million pounds of fuel in its bunkers when it sank. Much of the bunkerage was immediately breeched and/or burned immediately, but there's still plenty aboard. Show I watched the other day said the actual leakage rate is very low...something like eight ounces a day. But a little oil goes a long way.

Ron Wanttaja

[rwanttaja]

I once wangled a two-week work trip to Honolulu. The group I worked with had a luau on one of the Northern beaches the weekend I was there. Right across the road was an airport, with a very busy Cessna L-19 towing gliders. Having flown a Bird Dog as a CAP cadet, I naturally wandered across the road to watch.

Don't remember much (it was ~25 years ago) but do recall on the onshore breeze was pretty stiff, and the runway (limited by the terrain) resulted in a pretty strong crosswind.

Ron Wanttaja

[L16 Pilot]

I thought Pearl Harbor as a giant tourist trap. Lots of Japanese around but I understand Hawaii is a vacation and honeymoon spot for Japanese folks. The Arizona is humbling when you consider over 1000 are still interred in the sunken hull. For me the Punchbowl Cemetery was the highlight of my visit as I wrote a book about a B29 crew that was lost over Japan on May 7, 1945 (The Crew of the Empire Express and Peace on a Quiet Mountain in Japan). The pilot and copilot are interred at the Punchbowl and the names of three crew members executed by the Japanese on June 20, 1945 are listed on the Tablet of the Missing.

[CarlOrton]

Being from DFW and being a huge Texas Rangers fan, I always wear my Yu Darvish shirt when walking around Waikiki / HNL / Oahu. I get lots of stares, but no one has yet come up to me to chat.