Air and Space Museum Annex.
Having been to Washington DC many times, we have exhausted most of the usual DC attractions and were looking for something new and exciting.
I found some information about the Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, and it looked like just the ticket for a rainy April day. The museum is named after Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center,the man who gave the museum $60 million, making him its biggest donor. Udvar-Hazy is a Hungarian immigrant who made a fortune in the airplane-leasing business. The drive from the city to Chantilly didn’t take as long as we thought it would - my GPS could not locate this place – with the help of Rand McNally map and within an hour we were face-to-face with the biggest, blackest aircraft that we’d ever seen. It was the USAF SR71 Blackbird and it was huge! SR stands for Strategic Reconnaissance. The aircraft is painted a dark blue to increase the emission of internal heat. A product of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. The SR-71 remains the world's fastest and highest-flying operational manned aircraft. From an altitude of 80,000 ft, it could survey 100,000 square miles per hour of the Earth's surface. In addition, it was accurate enough to take a picture of a car's license plate from this altitude.
After making out way around the matte-black monster, we went to the back of the museum to see the US Space Shuttle Enterprise in the back room. Six air-worthy shuttles have been built; the first orbiter, Enterprise, was not built for space flight, and was used only for testing purposes. Five space-worthy orbiters were built: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after launch in 1986, and Endeavour replaced it. Then recently Columbia broke apart during re-entry in 2003.
I guess by now you are getting a sense of how large this facility is! There were planes, planes and more planes! Included in the exhibit was The Enola Gay the B-29 Super fortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in the attack on Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945, just before the end of World War II. Then there were F-14’s and planes of every size, shape and color, festooned about the building, some hangings on cables from the ceiling like toys in a young boy’s bedroom.
The museum is not too far from Dulles Airport and worth the time for a visit if you are in the area catching a fight on a plane that is not tethered to the ceiling on a string. Admission to the museum is free, but you do have to pay a parking fee of $9.00 if you bring your car. Other highlights include an IMAX theater and an observation tower.
Up-up and away! Coming attraction – The Transformers!
Going to the Mall.
In DC, the phrase “let’s go to the mall” has a totally different meaning than it does in the suburbs. With just a couple of hours to spend, sometimes it is tough to decide which museums to visit. We lucked out, as the hours had been extended until 7:30PM, and it is a good thing because even a simple “let’s duck in here” frequently turns into an extended stay. This time we checked out the Star Spangled Banner exhibit. The flag had been under repair for many years, and was on display at the American History Museum. Then the building was closed for a while as it was being renovated. We saw Old Glory in its new glory - housed in a special dark, dimly lit space that allows you to see it without the light damaging the wool fabric. Next we visited the elephant that has stood guard in the rotunda of the Natural History Museum for decades, bringing a bit of the African grasslands to the heart of DC.
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| Air and Space - Chantily |
