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Udvar-Hazy Center Air & Space Museum

While everyone who visits Washington, DC goes to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum to see its iconic aircraft like the Wright Brothers' flier or the Spirit of St. Louis, the REAL stuff is out next to Dulles Airport in Chantilly, VA at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Mr. Udvar-Hazy wanted to thank the United States for the opportunities he had when he immigrated to the US from Hungary in 1958 during the uprising against the Soviet Union. Prior to his gift for this facility, much of the Smithsonian's collection of aircraft like the Enola Gay were stored out-of-sight of the public.

The result is a marvelous facility in the shape of a "T." In the main long hall are hundreds of planes, jets, missiles, helicopters and engines, while the shorter hall has the Space Shuttle Discovery, all of the various models of space capsule used by the US, plus a host of missiles.

I recently traveled to Washington to visit my father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery, and took along my son. We spent a delightful afternoon inside the facility seeing just about every major plane you can name, along with many obscure ones I have never heard of. In addition, the museum has a restoration facility that you can see from behind a glassed portico, as well as items like an ME-163 Komet and a Heinkel HE-219 Uhu that are in the process of being put back together.

The highlights of the exhibition are clearly the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb. The aircraft is controversial in its own right, and attempts to "curate" it have largely met with criticism over the very act of the United States dropping The Bomb. The understated display simply shows the bomber in all its magnificent enormity. Other highlights include a Concorde, a Boeing 707 (the first really significant commercial jetliner), a pristine F-4U Corsair, a P-40, and the new F-22 Raptor.

I apologize for the poor quality of some images. The museum's lighting is dark on a good day, and it was overcast and rainy the day of my visit.