Japan Places|宮崎ブーゲンビリア空港 エアプレインパーク — The King Air That Missed the Wave

On 21 July 2012 a Beechcraft C90A King Air was parked on the observation deck at Miyazaki.

The airport building company was marking fifty years. The machine had already made a quieter landing here on 21 March, a graduation flight from the Civil Aviation College.

It had spent twenty-five years and about 1,700 cadets at the Sendai branch. On 11 March 2011 seven sister trainers on the ground were taken by the tsunami. This one was airborne on a lesson and came back to a field that no longer had them.

The official pages still call it the only observation deck at a Japanese airport with a real aircraft on show. Visitors can enter the cockpit between ten and six. Children borrow a cap. At night the airframe is lit.

The park sits on the roof above the same terminal that keeps the Moshi Moshi Corner one floor down. One is a last conversation. The other is a machine that was not on the ground when the water came.

Photo: Miyazaki Airport aerial photograph, 2017. Geospatial Information Authority of Japan / Wikimedia Commons.