Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center

The flagship building of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. opened on July 1, 1976. It houses some of the most iconic aircraft in history like the 1903 Wright Flyer and Spirt of St. Louis along with historic spacecrafts like the Apollo 11 command module and John Glenn’s Friendship 7. As amazing as the national museum is to visit, its collection had always been limited by space due to its location on the National Mall. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law authorizing an annex museum near Washington Dulles International Airport to be built entirely with private funds. Aviation industry leader Steven F. Udvar-Hazy donated $65 million to the Smithsonian Institution in 1999, making the massive facility possible. Construction began on the 176-acre site in 2000 and the first artifact, a Piper J-3 Cub, moved into the building on March 7, 2003. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center officially opened on December 15, 2003, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. The 760,000-square-foot facility houses over 200 aircraft and spacecraft within two massive hangers: the Boeing Aviation Hangar and the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar.

Upon entering the museum, visitors find themselves on a balcony giving them an elevated view of the Boeing Aviation Hangar with the SR-71 Blackbird directly in front of them. Designed by legend Kelly Johnson at Lockheed Skunk Works in the mid-1960s, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird remains the fastest and highest flying operational airbreathing manned aircraft ever flown. This Cold War reconnaissance aircraft was capable of achieving a top speed of Mach 3.3 (2,193 mph) and flying at a service ceiling of 85,000 feet where it could photograph 100,000 square miles of territory per hour. Due to its sustained high-speed flight, the SR-71 was primarily constructed of titanium which was capable of handling the aircraft’s surface temperatures which ranged between 500°F to 1,000°F. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the world’s leading supplier of titanium and they weren’t about to sell it to the United States for a spy plane. So, the CIA created front companies who bought small batches of titanium from the Soviets for a variety of fictitious enterprises. On March 6, 1990, an SR-71 piloted by Lt. Col. Raymond E. Yeilding set the cross-country speed record by flying between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. in just 1 hour and 7 minutes.

The Pre-1920 Aviation gallery has some wonderful examples of aircraft from the earliest days of aviation. While the 1903 Wright Flyer is on display at the Air and Space Museum on the Mall, the Udvar-Hazy Center has the Langley Aerodrome A on display. Samuel Pierpont Langley was an early aviation pioneer and a contemporary of the Wright brothers. He was developing a flying machine called the Aerodrome that he was testing on the Potomac River about the same time the Wrights were taking flight at Kitty Hawk. Langley never mastered flight controls like the Wright brothers and ultimately, he failed in developing powered flight. The 1911 Wright Flyer was the first aircraft that the Wright brothers sold to the Army and the first aircraft to be produced in quantity. The Boeing Aviation Hangar also has a large collection of aircraft from World War I such as the Curtiss JN-4D Jenny and the Nieuport 28C.1.

A significant portion of the Boeing Aviation Hangar is dedicated to aircraft from World War II. There is an entire section of German aircraft which has some very rare artifacts such as the rocket powered Messerschmitt ME 163 B-1a Komet and the radar equipped nighttime bomber Heinkel He 219 Uhu. Some of the first aircraft guests see when they enter the Udvar-Hazy Center are two iconic American WWII airplanes hanging from the rafters: sporting a Flying Tiger paint scheme is the Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk and the naval workhorse Vought F4U-1D Corsair. The center’s Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was undergoing some restoration work when I visited, but the nose art of Shoo Shoo Baby still looks fantastic. They have a great example of the Lockheed P-38J Lightning which was an important American aircraft in the Pacific theater. The Northrop N-1M was an experimental flying wing aircraft developed in the later years of the war and was the forerunner to the B-2 bomber that came decades later.

Perhaps the most infamous aircraft in history is also on display in the WWII gallery of the Udvar-Hazy Center. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in combat. The aircraft was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific carrying “Little Boy,” a 10,000-pound enriched-uranium atomic bomb. While flying over Hiroshima at an altitude of 31,000 feet, bombardier Major Thomas Wilson Ferebee used his Norden bombsight to target the Aioi Bridge and release “Little Boy”. At 8:15am local time, the bomb detonated at roughly 1,900 feet over Hiroshima destroying roughly three-quarters of the city. Following the war, the Air Force transferred ownership of the Enola Gay to the Smithsonian. The plane sat in outdoor storage and various warehouses for decades, falling into disrepair. Beginning in the 1980s, the Enola Gay began a multi-decade restoration before being moved into the new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003 for public display.

Interspersed within the enormous Boeing Aviation Hangar is a wide collection of aerobatic, sport, and record setting aircraft. The Red Bull Stratos capsule was a pressurized fiberglass and steel balloon gondola used by Felix Baumgartner on October 14, 2012, to ascend to 127,852 feet over Roswell, New Mexico, before making his record-breaking supersonic free-fall jump. In 2005 and 2006, accomplished aviator, balloonist, and sailor Steve Fossett made three absolute record-setting flights in the turbofan-powered Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. In this historic aircraft, Fossett was the first to solo nonstop around the world, set the absolute speed record for around the world flight (342 mph), and set the flight distance record (25,766 miles). Another record setting aircraft on display in the center is the gondola from the first balloon to fly around the world non-stop. In March 1999, the Breitling Orbiter 3 with pilots Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones launched from Switzerland and landed in Egypt nineteen days later.

Two of the largest artifacts in the center are on display in the commercial aviation gallery. The Concorde was a joint Anglo-French supersonic passenger airliner designed to cruise at more than twice the speed of sound (Mach 2.0+) and cut transatlantic travel time in half. Following years of independent feasibility studies, the United Kingdom and France signed an official treaty in 1962 to share the massive design and manufacturing costs. In fact, the name for the aircraft, “Concorde”, comes from the French word meaning “agreement”, “harmony”, or “union”. The Concorde entered commercial service in 1976 and was flown exclusively by Air France and British Airways. The plane carried 100 passengers in a 2-by-2 configuration at a cruising speed of 1,350 mph (Mach 2.02) and service ceiling of 60,000 feet. On February 7, 1996, the Concorde set the transatlantic speed record for a passenger plane by flying from New York to London in just 2 hours and 52 minutes. Facing increased operation costs and reduced demand in a post-9/11 world, the Concorde flew its final commercial flight on October 24, 2003.

In 1952 without any prior airline or military orders, Boeing president William Allen risked $16 million, roughly one-quarter of the company’s net worth, to fund a project to develop a revolutionary prototype jet aircraft. The yellow-and-brown prototype, known as the Boeing 367-80 or Dash 80, rolled out on May 15, 1954 with its maiden flight two months later following ground testing. During the Seafair hydroplane races over Lake Washington in August 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston shocked crowds and startled Boeing chief Bill Allen by performing a complete barrel roll in the prototype. The following day Johnson was called into Allen’s office to find out what he thought he was doing performing the stunt. Johnson famously replied, “I was selling airplanes”. Following a redesign to widen the aircraft’s fuselage, the world was introduced to the Boeing 707 which launched the commercial jet age. Orders for the new passenger jet poured in with Pan Am, American Airlines, and TWA all placing orders in 1955.

The Boeing Aviation Hangar also has a large collection of vertical flight aircraft. The Bell H-13J on display became the first helicopter to carry a sitting president when Dwight D. Eisenhower rode in it on July 12, 1957 as part of an evacuation drill. Many of the helicopters in the collection served a military role, but the non-military Bell 206L-1 Long Ranger II known as the Spirit of Texas flew into history. In September 1982, this customized helicopter completed the first-ever around-the-world flight by a helicopter in 29 days. Owned by the Bell Corporation, the Spirit of Texas was equipped with additional fuel tanks and floatation pontoons, and even had to refuel at sea by landing on a cargo ship.

The Cold War gallery has a collection of aircraft from the Korean and Vietnam wars including a pair of Soviet planes: the Mig 15bis and Mig 21F. They also have classic American aircrafts from the same era including the North American F-86A Sabre, Republic F105D Thunderchief, and the Vietnam-era Grumman EA-6B Prowler. One artifact with an interesting story is the NASA/Northrop M2-F3 which was an experimental wingless, rocket-powered research aircraft developed to test aerodynamic lift generated purely by the fuselage shape. This particular aircraft was reconstructed from the Northrop M2-F2 which crashed at Dryden Flight Research Center in 1967. That spectacular crash caught on film was the opening sequence to the 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man when astronaut Steve Austin (Lee Majors) crashed and had to be rebuilt with bionic technologies. The center also houses some modern military aircraft like a Grumman F14D Tomcat, F-18 Hornet, and a Lockheed Martin X-35B Joint Strike Fighter.

The James S. McDonnell Space Hangar houses the Udvar-Hazy Center’s collection of rockets, missiles, satellites, and human spaceflight artifacts. The Space Shuttle Discovery was the third operational shuttle to fly in space, serving as the most traveled and accomplished orbiter in the NASA fleet. The spacecraft was named after Captain James Cook’s HMS Discovery which on his final voyage through the Pacific led to the charting of the Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, and northwestern Canada. The Discovery was built by Rockwell International in Palmdale, California and was rolled out on October 16, 1983. Its maiden flight was on August 30, 1984 (STS-41D). Over its record 39 mission career, the Discovery spent 365 days in orbit, traveled 150 million miles in space, and safely transported 184 individuals into space. The Discovery participated in several historic missions including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 (STS-31), two critical Hubble repair missions, and flew John Glenn back to space at the age of 77. The dependable spacecraft flew the critical return-to-flight missions following the losses of Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003). Following completion of its final mission (STS-133) on March 9, 2011, the Discovery was transferred from NASA to the Smithsonian.

In the rear of the Udvar-Hazy Center is the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar which is dedicated to performing restoration and conservation work on historic aircraft in the Smithsonian’s collection. During my visit to the museum, there were two historic aircraft in the hangar receiving work. One of the aircraft was a Sikorsky JRS-1 flying boat which was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Following the attack, this particular aircraft participated in the search for the Japanese fleet off of Hawaii. Flak-Bait is a historic Martin B-26B Marauder medium bomber that holds the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) record for surviving the most combat missions over Europe during World War II. Manufactured in Baltimore, Maryland in April 1943, the aircraft was christened “Flak-Bait” by combining flak (German anti-aircraft artillery) with “Flea Bait,” a nickname for its first pilot’s dog. Between August 1943 and April 1945, Flak-Bait completed a record 207 combat missions including sorties in support of the D-Day Invasion at Normandy and Battle of the Bulge, as well as strikes against bridges, airfields, supply depots, and V-1 launch sites. The aircraft lived up to its name by absorbing heavy punishment; ground crews patched more than 1,000 individual flak and shrapnel holes over its career. It twice returned to base on a single engine and twice lost its electrical system to 88mm fire. Despite its record number of missions and heavy damage sustained, not a single one of Flak-Bait’s 350 crew members lost their lives over its historic service life. On April 17, 1945, it led the 322nd Bombardment Group on its 200th mission to Magdeburg, Germany. Designated for historical preservation at the end of the war by USAAF chief General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the bomber was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1949. It’s presently undergoing a multi-year restoration project in the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar before it will be returned to the exhibit floor.