I was on vacation for the last week or so. I went home to Virginia and spent a day at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Museum near Dulles. I took almost 400 pictures with my trusty Canon PowerShot S3 digital camera. Would anybody care to see them? I plan on putting them up on photobucket in the coming weeks.

If you ever have a chance to go to this place, I suggest you make the effort. It is incredible!! They have an SR-71 in there, a 707, a Concorde, an F-14, a Hawker Hurricane (might be a Sea Fury-- not sure), a P-38, P-61, F-86 and many, many more aircraft as well as engines and a host of other things too numerous for me to mention right now. I also scored two pamphlets from the place which I will post on photobucket as they do not appear to be copyrighted. I was blown away, to say the least. I took an overhead picture of a suspended P-26, completely missing the Blackbird on the floor underneath it! I never saw it. Talk about stealthy...

If the opportunity ever presents itself, you must go!! Admission is FREE; parking is twelve bucks for all day. There are shuttle buses from the original A&S museum on the Mall in D.C. if you think you can hit both on the same day. Fat chance!!!

I'll get to work on them and hope to have them up in an organized manner in a few weeks. I took tons, some of which are duplicates. There is a 4350 cid, 28-cylinder radial there that has been cut away to show the innards. I am fascinated by this engine. I took plenty o' pictures of it. It is sectioned and painted to show the internal parts. I am amazed that such precision was attainable 50-plus years ago. Keep looking back here every so often. I'll get them culled and organized sooner or later. Then I will only need to know how to post them...

The United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Airforce Base is better. Same goes for the United States Naval Aviation Museum at Pensacola Naval Air Station. I guess it just the I like the USAFM's shiny Cold War aircraft and that they will have a MiG-29 soon.

fighter25 wrote on May 30^th, 2007 at 7:05pm:


Well its better than the New England Air Museum!

Has anyone been to the one in Nebraska, not too far from Omaha? It's where SAC is based...

No mention of the Enola Gay?  That's probably the most historically significant artifact in that museum, isn't it?

The Smithsonian museums are really, really great.  The Air and Space is another not to be missed.  Take special care going through it though as some of their best items are not well publicised.  They had the original photo plates on which Pluto and I believe Neptune were discovered.  Those were just sitting in some cabinet somewhere.  They had pages from the Apolo mission notebooks and you could just see from the handwriting how difficult it was for them to write in 0g (probably slowly bouncing around the spacecraft while they did it).  They had one of the moon landing space suits with moon dust still ground in to the legs.  The engine from one of the Wright fliers had an uncerimonious place eleswhere in the museum.

Same goes for the American History museum as well.  For a contry as young as the US (with no real colonial history) the museums are very good.  But the British Museum and Library were better.  Granted the best items from those museums pre-dated the US by hundreds of years, so I guess the comparison is not really fair.  If you were to strip away all the stuff "aquired" during that country's colonial expansion then the museum would be a very empty place...