Not only is the museum itself awesome (and free), they are also responsible for almost every US warplane on display around the world. You can download a spreadsheet from their website showing where planes are on "loan".
The is called privatizing profit and socializing risk. Current management philosophies are all about mining assets and when the mine is empty, move on. It used to be about growing assets.
What you say is true but it doesn't take into account end-users. I always do soft deletes because I have to support undeletes. Mistakes happen and I get rewind an audit log to fix things.