💎 More than a Miracle

Good morning! Today is Wednesday, July 8, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

Today’s Charlotte Ledger special series “Hidden Gems” is sponsored by Foundation for the Carolinas. From tackling critical needs to sustaining cultural treasures, Foundation for the Carolinas helps people, companies and nonprofits create remarkable impact in our region. Learn how at fftc.org.

You know those places you've always meant to visit — the ones that have been around for years but rarely make headlines? They remind us of our history — good and bad — our remarkable achievements, the glories of nature, and, sometimes, they make us look at ourselves in new and occasionally weird ways.

In this series, longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman visits five overlooked Mecklenburg County destinations that deserve a spot on your summer itinerary. Here are places Toppman has already covered in this week’s series:

by Lawrence Toppman

Hardly anybody talks about the four deaths associated with the Miracle on the Hudson, when pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger set a U.S. Airways jet down safely on the Hudson River in 2009. But you’ll hear about them at Charlotte’s Sullenberger Aviation Museum.

The four corpses belonged to birds, which entered the engines on each side of Flight 1549 a few minutes after it left LaGuardia Airport in Queens. We know they were Canada geese because technicians identified the snarge — an aviation term for remains from a bird strike — as Branta canadensis. And I know that because I joined the Miracle on the Hudson Experience at the museum. (The docent was too polite to explain that “snarge” conflates “snot” and “garbage.”)

As you’ll guess, the MOH Experience is exhaustive and, for me, a little exhausting. I marveled at a film recreating the crash, wincing as we “hit” the water. I studied the wreck, preserved in its entirety in a hangar near Charlotte Douglas International Airport, with interest. But I started to burn out during the last part of the two-hour walkaround, when we donned latex gloves to handle recovered items such as a safety cushion, an unused life vest and a piece of the fuselage. (OK, the fuselage chunk was cool.)

I was tempted by mild museum fatigue to skim the rest of the venue, but that would’ve been a mistake: It conveys not only the history of air travel and commerce in the Queen City but, in an abbreviated way, of aircraft in peace and war.

Signs say “Airheads welcome,” and I qualify: My father was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Air Force, and he and I built models of Lockheed’s F-104 Starfighter and Boeing’s B-52 Stratofortress when I was a kid. So I was saddened to take the Sullenberger’s “What aircraft are you?” quiz and learn I was a Douglas DC-7: Stolid, reliable, soon to be outmoded by the next generation, when jets replaced piston engine-powered passenger aircraft. (You’ll find a DC-7 on the Sullenberger’s Outdoor Plaza, its Eastern Airlines logo still faintly visible.)

The museum offers various attractions for kids: flight simulators, cockpits they can enter and even small areas where they learn to pack luggage efficiently or design aerodynamically efficient paper airplanes. Leaving aside the hands-on fun, I can think of three types of people who would especially enjoy the Sullenberger.

The first would be historians of all stripes. We forget that manned, heavier-than-air flight is a relatively recent phenomenon: All four of my grandparents were born before Orville and Wilbur Wright made their brief Kitty Hawk voyages in 1903. A replica of their glider and flier hangs at the Sullenberger — always remember to look upward when you visit — although the originals are at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

I especially liked learning about Igor Sikorsky, the Ukrainian-American aviation pioneer inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne. He virtually invented and refined the modern helicopter as a rescue hovercraft; he created the first mass-produced helicopter in 1942, and he lived to see his designs used in the Vietnam War.

There, the Sikorsky-built Jolly Green Giant could carry 25 troops, 15 patients on stretchers or 5,000 pounds of cargo. You’ll see one of those on the Outdoor Plaza, near a Sheridan Tank — yes, a 17-ton tank — designed to be airlifted into combat by something like the massive, squat-bellied C-130 Hercules transport plane, visible elsewhere on the plaza.

The second group of potential fans would be Charlotteans who want a better understanding of their airport. The Queen City can officially celebrate the 100th anniversary of aviation here in three years. Yet though the Charlotte Airport opened in 1929, sitting on 200 acres bought from the city near the World War I training site Camp Greene, it didn’t become an airmail stop until 1930 and didn’t have daily passenger flights (two) until 1937.

The Historic Hangar offers a whirlwind tour of Charlotte-based activity, from the military’s use of Morris Field during World War II to the expansion as Douglas Municipal Airport in 1954 (named for Ben Douglas, Charlotte’s mayor in the 1930s) to its current iteration as the ninth-busiest airport in the United States, carrying 2,155,465 passengers on 2,250 flights this April.

The third group, of course, would be people captivated by the narrative of the miracle, and they’ll focus on the Main Hall. It’s easy to miss things there: The 120-foot hulk of Flight 1549 dominates the space and our consciousness so powerfully that the Carolinas Aviation Museum, which had kept that name since opening in 1991, became the Sullenberger Aviation Museum after acquiring the plane 15 years ago.

You can see the exterior of the plane whether you spend the extra $10 for the MOH Experience or not, and nobody goes inside the cockpit or cabin either way. Leave time for exhibits around it, including a “black box” flight recorder — which is orange, by the way — and the Norden bombsite used to pinpoint Hiroshima when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb in 1945. (Bombardier Thomas Ferebee came from Mocksville, N.C.)

P.S. I seldom recommend gift shops. But the one at the Sullenberger, which you pass through to reach the exhibits, offers merchandise you won’t find elsewhere locally. I considered the wood-and-metal cheese board shaped like a 1950s plane ($89.99), the $19.99 plush toy of a grinning Southwest Airlines jet — you have to love an airline that sells tickets in monthly installments — and even the orange windsock for $74.99. I looked lovingly at small airplane models that sent my memory spinning back 60 years, but many now come pre-assembled. These kids today!

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for The Charlotte Ledger’s Toppman on the Arts newsletter.

Here’s a hint: The Queen City’s Revolutionary history is a strong draw to this east Charlotte site.