Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

As part of my Christmas treat, Craig drove me from  his house in York to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum  in Virginia. I wanted to  compare it with the hands-off attitude of the disappointing ‘Intrepid’ Museum in New York. In fact, the Smithsonian was no more hands-on than the Intrepid museum but the vastness of its aeronautical scope with half the exhibits suspended  from the ceiling in flying attitudes excluded any touching.  The museum contains the history of flight from its very beginning! I was excited to see the planes from my era–WW2– The spitfire, Black Widow, B29 and even “Enola Gay” which  flew too high for me to see but, never-the-less, saved my life as well as the thousands of other  Japanese, POW’s.

The ‘sticks and string’ contraptions show the intrepid beginnings of human’s lift-off from mother earth but the IMAX  film ‘Hubble’ shows how incredibly far he has reached! The sharp images of suns being born millions of light-years away are amazing–mind-boggling! And it is clear that the pace of change is being led from space research and that we will learn infinite times more in the next decade or so than we have since ‘flight’s’ beginning.

The following pictures are a sample of a vast array of aeronautical stuff and will, I suspect, be of interest only to airplane and space buffs. Don’t forget to click on the pictures for detail:

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Space creatures?

Back end . . . .

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Life-saving tiles

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Toy lander . . . . .

. . . detail of the toy

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The atom-bomber

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Distillery?

Rocket range

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Travel-worn “Discovery”–Here to rest!