Air Force Armament Museum

Seventeen acres of grass and hardstanding with the aircraft parked in the open, which means you walk right up to them rather than looking across a rope in a hangar. That proximity is the whole appeal, and it is a very different experience from a museum where everything is behind glass.

The SR-71 is the draw. Standing under a Blackbird gives you the shape properly — the chines running forward from the wing, the black composite skin, the enormous engine nacelles — and explains why a reconnaissance aircraft designed in the early 1960s still looks like it arrived from somewhere else.

The B-52G is the other one that changes scale. You cannot photograph it usefully from underneath; you have to walk to the far side of the park and turn round.

Beyond those: a broad run of American fighters and bombers, helicopters, and foreign types including a MiG-21, which in a museum devoted to armament is there to be compared rather than admired.

The aircraft are outdoors on the Gulf Coast, so condition varies and restoration is continuous. Some will be under cover or off display. That is the trade for being able to touch the tyres.

Twenty thousand square feet, and the reason the museum is called what it is.

The indoor collection is ordnance and the story of how it developed: iron bombs, rockets, aerial cannon and machine guns, and the progression through to precision-guided munitions. Cases explain what each weapon was for, how it worked and, notably, how well it actually performed — which is a more candid framing than military museums often manage.

Eglin's own role runs through it. The base has been the Air Force's armament development and testing home for decades, and much of what is displayed was proved on ranges a few miles from where you are standing. The Doolittle Raid crews trained at Eglin in 1942, and that story is told here.

There are aircraft indoors as well, out of the weather and in better condition than the air park examples, along with uniforms, engines and cockpit sections.

A film theatre runs documentary material. There is a gift shop. Restrooms are inside, which is worth knowing before you commit to the far end of the air park on a July afternoon.

Because the ranges are here. Eglin Air Force Base covers something in the order of 463,000 acres of Okaloosa, Santa Rosa and Walton counties, which makes it one of the largest military installations in the world by area, and the reason for that size is that testing aerial weapons requires a very large piece of empty ground. Much of the northern half of this county is an air force range and always has been.

That fact shapes everything a visitor sees. It is why the coastal strip is so narrow and so intensively developed — there is nowhere inland to build. It is why the highway network runs the way it does. It is why Hurlburt Field, home of Air Force Special Operations Command, sits a few miles west of Fort Walton Beach, and why the town's economy has had a military floor under it since the 1930s.

So the museum is not a tourist add-on dropped onto a beach resort. It is the explanation for the beach resort's existence in this particular place at this particular size. An hour here and an hour at the temple mound downtown and you have the whole of Fort Walton Beach: twelve hundred years of settlement, and one air base that changed everything in a decade.