July 4th my brother and I were looking for some convenient thing to do with the kids. We ended up going to the new Air & Space Museum near Dulles Airport. There were lots of interesting airplanes to see there.

So many of the airplanes in this building I'd read about in books about the heros of WW II. In my pre teen years I'd also built scale models of them from kits. Nowadays kids are more likely to see them here or in movies.

  

     

It's something that part of the space program is a USPS mailbox decorated to look like R2D2. I betcha someone out there thinks they saw an alien life form just because they dropped mail in a box like that.

  

This was a real space shuttle. It had been to the international space station many times before they retired it.

This was the work shop where they are getting new aquisitions ready for showing. I suppose many of them have suffered fifty years of neglect before whomever owned them figured out a good way to get ride of it was give it to the Smithsonian. Then they come to this workshop before being displayed. Restoration work is done by experts with good tools and plenty of supplies there.

I remember seeing the Concorde fly over regularly when I lived in Reston. It was the wave of the future, a trans Atlantic flight in just a couple of hours or something like that. They flew regularly for years before people figured out that the added expense to save four hours just wasn't worth all the fuel it cost. When they retired it that was a signal that the future of ever faster was dying of inconvenient truths for me.

Below are a couple of the more interesting one of a kind aircraft.

  

Can you imagine working for years to make a plane/car hybrid that worked better than any of the other versions of the idea but not being able to sell it because the compromises forced by the design parameters made it not as good a car as the real cars and not as good a plane as the real planes? Probably a whole team of people spent major chunks of their lives on the project.

I saw this exhibit in the Air & Space Museum on Capitol Mall back in the winter of '95-'96. I'd known H. Ross Perot as the guy that put the Reform Party on the ballot, but here in the Smithsonian he was known for setting an expensive world record. He made a lot of money selling data processing equipment and services to the U. S. Government.

You're looking at one of the first airplanes that really proved there was a role for aircraft because they improved our view of the world around us.

     

I got each of the kids a model to assemble at their leasure. I figured I enjoyed building the things when I was their ages, so likely they would enjoy the experience to. None of them have experience building models. I warned Aiden that his would be a challenge. He was like "okay, no problem, I can do it." I'm looking forward to seeing proof.