Planes, Planes, Planes, and Some Space Ships
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22 responses to “Planes, Planes, Planes, and Some Space Ships”
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Thanks for sharing. From Richmond, you can take Amtrak and the silver line metro and Uber to save the drive and traffic. Or, drive 17 from Fredericksburg and beat the 95 traffic. I haven’t been to this museum, but your pictures convinced me to take my granddaughter this summer!!
Also small increments is a great idea.
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Sounds like a plan.
Lots to see, but driving and parking can take away from the experience, especially with children.
When our children were younger, we would watch movies and read age appropriate books about historic things we planned to visit just before going. It helped them enormously to appreciate what they were seeing.
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Thanks for sharing. From Richmond, you can take Amtrak and the silver line metro and Uber to save the drive and traffic. Or, drive 17 from Fredericksburg and beat the 95 traffic. I haven’t been to this museum, but your pictures convinced me to take my granddaughter this summer!!
Also small increments is a great idea.
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I’m sending this to a friend and classmate who is a docent there, Buz Carpenter, an ex-SR71 pilot. If you find him, he gives a great tour.
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America’s attic. And they know what and where everything is.
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One interesting tidbit that I forgot to mention in the article: some of the articles that the astronauts wore, such as gloves and helmets, were molded specifically for the body of that astronaut.
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Some of whom were my neighbors at Edwards AFB, their kids my classmates. The second astronaut class was in training there at the time. For my Dad, “The Right Stuff” was a story he lived. I need to get back to that wonderful museum. Another neighbor was an SR-71 pilot and I think his name appears in a display, too. He had cute daughters. 😉 Maj. Adams (can’t remember his full name.) They actually flew out of George AFB.
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Yep, haven’t been in awhile but definitely need to go back again. Certainly worth the price of
admissionparking… -
Mr. Dick be sure to visit Sully Plantation directly across from air museum. Well preserved home of NOVA’s first congressman Richard Bland Lee. Interesting house. A Philadelphia townhouse in the midst of Fairfax dairy farm belt. It is the only place left that shows what the countryside of Fairfax once looked like.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/sully-historic-site/-
I saw some signs relating to Sully, but did not know what it was. I won’t be able to make it this trip, but will later. Thanks for the tip.
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I toured the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this past week. It is more like a Florida theme park and costs 80 bucks to get in. The best part was the bus tour to all of the famous launch pads. They had a mock up of Friendship 7 in the rocket garden. A trash can strapped to a Titan II ICBM. I don’t know how they found volunteers for those early missions. Udvar Hazy is much better than the Kennedy Space Center.
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I visited it several years ago when I took my daughter to Dulles to catch a plane. A couple items of personal interest were an old “corncob” radial engine similar to ones my dad used to work on in the early 50s. Another was a Beechcraft Bonanza which was flown non-stop from Hawaii to Teterboro, New Jersey in 1949. We lived within walking distance of Teterboro, and my mom took my brother and I to see it.
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Those original v-tail Bonanzas were quite distinctive.
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I just wished that the food was better.
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They have a Shake Shack now.
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Thanks for sharing. This place is a national treasure.
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Take one of the guided tours available at the Museum. We spent 3 hours with an incredible volunteer who made the place come alive. The stories are as important as the artifacts.
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My Dad may have gotten there with my brother. I hope so. We all went to the one on the Mall years ago, and he got to the small military air museum at Pungo, just a year before he passed, where the crowd was enthralled as he told WWII anecdotes, inspired by their B-25. The greatest air shows I ever saw were at Edwards back in the 60s, when the Thunderbirds were still flying century series jets and they would roll out the really cool stuff they were testing. We saw the B-70 fly just a couple of weeks before it crashed. I hope the younger generation still finds this cool. Hoping to take the 9-year old to the Langley show in May.
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I never got to see the Thunderbirds with the F-100C. They were flying F-4 Phantoms by the time I was old enough to appreciate them.
Growing up in a Navy town, I saw the Blue Angels more than the T-birds. I’ve seen the Angels fly F-4s , A4s, and F-18s.
I was at the air show at Oceana the year the Navy debuted the F-18, which was still the YF-17 at the time. An amazing aircraft.
I used to love air show time when I was a kid because the skies over Virginia Beach would be full of historic aircraft in the days before and after a show. I once got to see, and hear (I heard the before I saw them) a B-17, B-24 and B-25 flying in formation on their way out of town the day after a show. Hearing ten radial aircraft engines flying over you in unison was a rare event by the 1970s.
Great times.
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We get over to Udvar Hazy with some regularity. You can see an IMAX or go up into the observation deck to see aircraft coming into Dulles. Got a nice pic of the distant Blue Ridge mtns there.
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A beautiful collection especially with the displays of early aviators.
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I could not agree more. It’s a national treasure house. About 15 years ago a friend, now deceased, invited me to her company’s Christmas party, held there. The food was great, and eating dinner seated next to the SR-71 was most memorable. The mechanic/engineer in me was fascinated by the 28 cylinder radial engines in cutaway view.
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