TUDM Museum

Have you ever been to the TUDM (Royal Air Force) museum in downtown KL? If you haven't, I don't blame you. Although I drove by this museum every day to get to work, I only get to visit it last week when I brought my family to a wedding at a hall nearby.



The TUDM museum is located at the entrance of the Sungai Besi air force base. The air force base itself was our country's first international airport that was converted to an air force base after it relocated to Subang. To get there, just go to the air force base entrance, nod politely at the personnel and turn left immediately after the checkpoint post.



Even during weekend, you'll find a lot of empty parking spaces and when we got there, there were no other visitors present. The TUDM museum is more like a junkyard for old and retired air force jet fighters and planes. After going to the entrance, you'll find a row of old, rusty and decaying planes of all sizes lining up in a rectangular in front of a little hanger that houses a few more planes and exhibit.



Many of the planes are already in a state of decay with presumably little care or maintenance if any. Some of them are literally falling apart with rust all over and a few became a nice little nesting spot for birds, decorated by bird droppings.



With such appalling state of display, little wonder that very few tourist or visitors bothered to go there safe for a few curious locals like me. It is sad that the country's only air force museum is in such a sorry state. I'm pretty certain that the ministry of defence gets a few billions in budget every year and surely a few million from that could go the better maintenance of the air force museum that is currently rusting to oblivion.