03/01/2026
Long-time SMS engineer and manager Carl Brainerd visited the GNS:
"On February 9 I visited the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. They have a LOT of interesting aircraft there, but I especially wanted to see their exhibit of the SMS GNS Crew Station that they got from Wings of Dreams. I've included a couple of photos of it. They have the forward and aft sections separated by 8' or so, and both are exhibited behind floor-to-ceiling glass barriers. They have some signage explaining what it is and where it came from, but ther lighting is so dim that it was difficult to read and I didn't bother to photograph it. As you'll see in the pictures, the front cockpit lighting is mostly red instead of white. This may be an artifact of the base being used as a movie prop for filming the movie "Moonfall". Maybe the movie guys did it. I must say I didn't care much for the red lighting, and again the dim lighting made it all just seem too dark.
As you can see in the photo of the front of the Crew Station, the movie guys placed fake thermal tiles all over the exterior. I thought they actually looked pretty good, though, even if fake.
The MDUs looked like they had actual "live" video displayed on them, although the only real "live" or dynamic part was a little blinking text on one display. I deduced that they must have replaced the MDU displays with off-the-shelf LED replacements in order to put any sort of display on the screens. Since I was curious about this, I sent them an inquiry about it. I got a nice reply from their Director of Collections. He confirmed that the MDU displays had been replaced by commercial displays bought on eBay."
