We Finally Made it to the Other Air and Space Museum

July 7th, 2008 categories: About Us, Lake Tahoe Real Estate

National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: SR71 BlackbirdAn SR71 Blackbird and the Enola Gay all in one sitting.

Standing there right in front of it, so close one can touch the tip of its slender, pointed nose, the SR71 Blackbird makes for a great abstract image, but from this angle it doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of a technically revolutionary aircraft behind it. Looks though can be deceiving, and certainly this image is one of those.

(SR71 image by Olivier Curial)

(click "read the rest of this entry" below)

National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: The Enola GayWe have been to the Air and Space Museum before, the one near the US Capitol. Our favorite things there are The Spirit of St. Louis that carried Lindberg across the Atlantic and made him a then modern day rock star, and the Bell X1 that Chuck Yeager named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife, before he broke the speed barrier for the first time in it.

There, every time we visit, we also seem to spend a lot of time looking at the space capsule that first carried John Glenn into orbit. Egads! Talk about claustrophobically, you can’t stand-up, or stretch out, tight. The replica of the Wright Brothers plane from Kitty Hawk is also a studious wonder. We also have fun looking at the replica of the Apollo Lunar Module. And yes, a replica of the lunar "golf club" is there too (one can not go to the moon without hitting a golf ball, apparently).

National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: Space Shuttle Enterprise replicaAs mentioned in earlier posts we have spent a lot of time in Washington, DC, and at one point I lived there years ago. For some unknown reason though, there must be one, we’ve never been to the other Air and Space Museum, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. But we have now. And this is where a few other real air and space gems reside.

Moving to either side of the Blackbird’s nose, the size and shape of the aircraft takes form. It’s huge, much more so than I ever imagined. The swift craft is 107 feet long, and most of its wingspan of 55-feet is engine, two massive, go-real-fast ones. The whole thing is nothing much more than jet engines, one very long fuel tank, aerodynamic angles, and not much more than a suggestion of much else. (more about the SR71 here)

It wasn’t the Blackbird that got us there however. It was the Enola Gay. Yep, it’s here now, and has been on permanent display since 2003.

National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: F14 TomcatGrowing up military (dad was a career Infantry officer), we had a natural gravitation and affection for things of the sort: planes, ships, tanks and big guns were focal points for our imaginations for some time. My favorite plane was the B-29.

We lived in Paris when I was 11, and there our father had an opportunity to dine with Col. Paul Tibbits, who as we all know named the Enola Gay after his mother. Too young, I wish I had been there nevertheless. Even back then in 1958, I knew who he was.

The Enola Gay was delivered to the Smithsonian in 1961. It wasn’t restored until at least 1985. In 1994 it’s fuselage was put on display as part of the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. Controversy immediately erupted.

Critics of the exhibit, especially from the American Legion and the Air Force Association, claimed the exhibit focused too much on casualties inflicted by the nuclear bomb, rather than on the motivations for the bombing or the discussion of the bomb’s role in ending the World War II. Subsequently that exhibit was cancelled.

We are of course aware of both sides of the debate of that which was carried out by Col. Tibbits and the Enola Gay. Our opinion, which matters to us and likely little else, is that Harry Truman made a choice that saved lives, very many of them, on both sides of the war.

National Air & Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: Olivier Curial looks at the model from Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind.Another thing we much enjoyed looking at is one of the models of the alien ship used in mClose Encounters of the Third Kind. We also liked looking at the F-14 that shot down one of the planes over Libya during the Reagan era, and also a replica of the mars lander and it’s little robot drone, Sojourner (my grandson wants one of those).

In addition to the aircraft, which is plentiful (list of all of it here), there are many interesting display cases and exhibits throughout. All easy to read and absorb, and many with the means to stop and allow one to think about events past, and about how our nation either responded to or shaped the world we live in today.

This was also an exceptional history lesson for Olivier, who had about the same reaction as we would have at 14. It’s better than TV and the web. There’s little like standing next to these amazing machines.

We’re thinking we find the Dulles Air and Space Museum easier than the one downtown on the mall. It’s more wide open, was less crowded when we were there, and takes less time to go through all of it. It was an easy and most pleasant thing for us to do.

 

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under About Us, Lake Tahoe Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Real Esate Tomato Chiclet