This museum was T's choice, and he was pretty excited to go. I'm not really into air and space, but I do like museums so it was pretty fun for me, too. Now for the actual museum part!
The museum is basically a giant hangar. There's not really a good flow to it, which is good because then lines don't build up, but it is also bad because it is hard to make sure you have seen everything. We started by taking the stairs down from the main entry to take the special elevator to get to the 360 observation tower. The view is pretty cool and you can see planes landing and taking off from Dulles Airport. You can also hear the air traffic controllers at Dulles. The elevator runs every five minutes but if we would have had to wait longer than that, it wouldn't be worth it to us. You can't see downtown D.C. and we're not that into traffic control.
Now a bunch of pictures!
There are so many kinds of plane engines on display. They were massive! I'm not into engineering and how things work, but this is stuff that I know T and some of his brothers would be really in to.
This is the SR-71 aka The Blackbird aka the fastest plane in the world. T was pretty excited about this one.
I think it looks pretty awesome. And that is all I know about it. But T knew all kinds of stuff about it like:
It is only used for recon. It has never been captured. It has a maximum speed of mach 3.3. The flight manual for the SR-71 was just declassified by the government in May 2010. It is no longer an active plane and per its contract all molds used to create the plane were destroyed. It was active from December 1966 to March 1990. It really makes me wonder if we had this kind of technology in the 1960's what are we capable of now that the government just hasn't let us know about yet?!! It flew from L.A. to D.C. in 1 hour 4 minutes 20 seconds - that's an average of 2,124 miles per hour. As you might recall, it took us six days to complete that same distance...
It is one sleek looking plane.
We saw a Tomkat - the plane from "Top Gun."
Check out all that serious firepower! Wowza. I was really impressed with the amount of weapons on that plane!
The X-35B. This is the prototype that the F-35 is based on. T told me to put that. I don't know what a F-35 is.
We also saw the space shuttle Enterprise.
Not to be confused with the star ship Enterprise (photo from here).
Seriously, the Enterprise is MASSIVE (it also looks really fake). Anyway, it is hard to imagine how big the rocket is that the ship is attached to for take off! Also, check out the floating astronaut in the top left.
Some crazy looking satellite or umbrella or... something... What? I told you I'm not really an air and space person.
In the Enterprise hangar they had a display of about 24 astronaut foods displayed. It was gross and fun to guess what everything was. We almost bought some freeze dried astronaut ice cream in the gift shop, but I was sure that it would taste disgusting so we didn't. But I think I still might want to try it sometime. If someone else buys it...
This is John Glenn's chair (obviously). It was specially molded to his body so the G forces wouldn't be so, you know, crushing. It is hard to tell but the back goes way far back so it looks like his head would have been at an odd angle. Then we figured that the back is probably so deep because of all the gear he was wearing. Anyway, those NASA guys thought of a lot of things that didn't even occur to me.
This the general view from the main hangar. It's like a little kid's room, except all the planes are full size and real.
Overall, this museum had fewer signs / info than the other Smithsonian museums. I kinda liked it because it was nice to avoid the information overload. I think this would be a good museum for little kids because it's very little detailed history / informational plaques and much more "check out how cool this plane looks!" Then again, I don't have kids so this is completely hearsay.
The Concord aka the fastest passenger plane.
From the side it looks like a pretty normal plane.
But from the top you can see that it actually looks pretty different.
This picture is from the upper level. Don't skip the upper level. It's a cool view and there are lots of planes on display that are so tiny you wonder how people fit in them much less fly them. Like this little guy.
The number of planes is in the museum is just astounding. There is the SR-71 Blackbird again.
I think it might be cool to fly (okay, glide) in one of these sometime. Really.
For this museum I think I might have enjoyed the tour because I totally don't know anything about airplanes and I think I would have liked knowing some random cool random facts. At other museums (American History / Art / Natural History) I feel like I already know enough about the subjects that I can skip around and see only what I know I am interested in and I already know the random facts that the tour guide would tell me. Good thing T was around at this museum. He knows a lot about certain planes and I enjoyed hearing him tell me about them.
This little gunner plane is crazy. Check out how tiny that windshield is. How do you even see enough of anything to fly? Also, there is no protection whatsoever for the guy in the back manning the gun.
The Enola Gay is a huge prop plane. Huge.
The front of the Enola Gay reminds me of the ship from the Disney movie "Atlantis" (which I have never actually seen).
I would say that the majority of the visitors were male. Lots of dads and sons. There are some cool free things geared toward kids (and fun loving adults) but they all close at 4 p.m. You can get inside a Cessna and look around and take photos or simulate flying the Wright Model B plane. The IMAX movies were $7 per person and to take a flight simulator, where they do barrel rolls and such, was $8 per person. We didn't do either.
Overall, it was pretty cool. We spent three hours there. If I had gone alone, I think I could have done it in one hour. We haven't been to the Air and Space Museum on the Mall, so I'm not sure how it stacks up.
T really enjoyed it. A lot. He liked that they had some not-so-common planes and has, at one point or another, wanted to fly the vast majority of them. (Hmmm, anybody have a cool $110M laying around for one of these?)
The museum is definitely more plane-oriented than space-oriented. You should see this if you are into aviation, even though it is not really that close to the city. If you are flying out of Dulles in the afternoon, this might be something cool to do the morning you leave because you are already out there. If you aren't very interested in planes / space, and only have a few days in D.C. this is something you can skip. If you live here then you should take a group (so you're not paying $15 to park for just one person!) and see it once because it does have some cool stuff.
Cooool! :)
ReplyDeleteTalk about a few planes! Fun!
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