Old Birds

People who visit museums tend to fall into one of two categories; those that know nothing about the exhibits in front of them, and those who know more than enough. These categories do not include the usual herds of school kids who only know that they are not in class today and who are savoring a rare taste of freedom.

I visited the Udvar-Hazy facility of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, also known as the Air/Space Annex, near Dulles Airport the other day. Forget the $12 parking fee and the fact that the building is out in the middle of nowhere (OK, not the middle, but you can see it on a clear day). Forget that the lots are less than 25% full and its the least visited of all the Smithsonian facilities. What's really cool is that it's big enough to house real airplanes, real really big airplanes.

The first to catch the eye is the SR-71 Blackbird. Sleek and flat black like Steve McQueen's Mustang in Bullet, as menacing as a T. rex, it sits on the ground floor, looking ready to chew right through the walls and take off.



"Did you know," said an airplane geek, standing at the nose of the beast, "that when they flew this bird from Edwards Air Force Base to here, it broke the speed record for time across North America? And that was just practice." I knew that particular factoid, but went along anyway; "Last time I saw one of these, they had just been declassified and were touring the air show circuit." "Whoa," came the reply, "you go back some on this plane." I mentioned that when last I saw an operational Blackbird, the crew had spread tarps under it to catch the oil dripping out of the fuselage and wings. "Yeah," my expert replied, "these things were built loose in the airframe and leaked like sieves. When they got up past Mach 2 or 3, the air friction and heat caused them to tighten up. If they were that tight on the ground, they would implode at speed." I noticed the tail insignia and pointed it out. "oh, yeah," came the reply, now aimed at a small cluster of people who had gathered for the impromptu lecture, "that's the symbol of the Skunkworks." The Skunkworks was a super secret facility located in (wait for it) Area 51 out in the Nevada desert. The Blackbird, the B-1 and -2s and the U-2 were all developed and test flown there. No wonder people kept reporting UFOs all the time. Report seeing a highly classified aircraft that doesn't exist from an experimental facility that isn't there, and nobody in any authority will say "yeah, that's one of ours."



The museum is loosely divided in to general themes. Military, civil aviation, and space. The military wing has examples of aircraft I grew up reading about; a Nieuport with the Lafayette Escadrille emblem on the side, a Spad and a German biplane are the heart of the World War I section. The Spad comes equipped with a Lewis machine gun, state of the art in 1918, and cool enough to be used by George Lucas as one of the weapons carried by the Imperial storm troopers in the first Star Wars movie.




The World War II area has more aircraft, simply because the old biplanes are few and far between today. As a kid I built models of many of the WWII aircraft and hung them from my bedroom ceiling with monofilament fishing line. The Smithsonian has done the same with some of the smaller aircraft, using something stronger than monofilament. The windscreens aren't clouded over with gluey thumbprints either. An old Flying Tiger fighter, a Navy Hellcat and a short takeoff and landing Lysander used for inserting spies and agents into occupied Europe are locked in a frozen dogfight overhead.



The silver dollar in the penny pile, though, has to be the Enola Gay, arguably the most famous airplane in history. An airplane that changed history, carefully restored to look like it did on the morning of the last day of the old world. You can't look at this machine and be neutral about it. I once asked my dad, a veteran of the European Theater, what he thought about the atom bomb. His answer paralleled a quote from James Jones (a veteran combat infantryman and author of From Here to Eternity and several other World War II novels). "It meant" he said, "that I was going to be able to grow up and have a life." My musings were interrupted by a family strolling the catwalk and reading the signage. "This is the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb on Japan" read the dad. "I thought Japan was on our side." replied the semi-bored son. "It is now, but not then." I blame the education system. Had I wits quick enough, I would have quoted Robert Oppenheimer from the Batisvada, "Now I am become death, breaker of worlds" although I doubt anyone present would have got it.



Pride of place, however, goes to the Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first one and possibly the only shuttle named by geeks. Housed in its own gallery with the rest of the space stuff, the first impression is one of overwhelming enormity. It is hard to believe something that big can actually fly. It's like a building with engines you can stand up in. The eye ignores the space suited astronaut off in the corner and provided for scale.



The Smithsonian prides itself on keeping all their exhibits in working order. You could, for example type a letter on one of their vintage 1900 Remington typewriters. A few years back, they let out the Tom Thumb, the first locomotive in North America and took it for a spin on an old B&O spur line along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. I suppose they could, if the spirit moved them, oil and gas up any aircraft hanging from the ceiling and buzz Dulles Airport.