Dulles Air and Space Museum

On Wednesday, it was quite rainy here and so Preston got off of work early. Considering it was Wednesday, we knew that there was going to be a spectacular docent at the Air and Space Museum and so we thought we would go for an afternoon excursion. Lucky for us, Auntie Em was there and we were able to get a top of the line tour.

Here are some of my personal favorites.

This is the Enterprise that never went up into space but has almost all the features that a space shuttle would. It has been used for several tests for our space program. In a year or two, they will be receiving the Discovery which will be an incredible addition to the museum. Just looking at this, makes me think of Apollo 13 (the movie). I thought it was interesting that our initial flight into space was actually in a missile. They just plopped a couple people in there and shot them up into space and then brought them back down. It’s amazing how far we have come!

This is a replica of the Wright Brother’s first military plane and Emily showing us how it flew. She told us later that their plane wouldn’t have even flown the length of the museum or the height. And yet, in just over a hundred years, we have the capability to fly 6x the speed of sound. Just imagine where we will be in the next 100 years.

This is a picture of the Enola Gay. (Sorry for all of you who actually know the type of planes that these are-I’m completely clueless). This is the actual plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. They had to make a lot of modifications to the actual plane because they knew that they were going to be carrying a large, heavy bomb. The pilot was given the privilege of naming the plane. He knew that this plane was going to be famous one day so he decided to name it after someone important to him and encouraged him in his flying career…his mother (Happy Mother’s Day to all you great moms out there! See you do make a difference). He painted that name on it the day before he took flight and that paint is still the original paint.

By this point in our tour, Carl started getting a little antsy, so he found a new trick with his new stroller. Wow, isn’t he clever? Funny part was after he walked it around the museum for awhile, he suddenly plopped on the floor and put his thumb in his mouth when I tried to sit him in his stroller. Funny boy.

This is a plane that can go 3 ½ x the speed of sound. For those of you that saw Transformers II, you will remember this plane as one of the characters. We had never seen the movie but saw the movie clip on the side.

There was a time that people believed that cars that could fly would be the next “big thing.” So this is an example of a car/plane. The front end can back up into the back end and turn into a plane. Funny huh?

Carl and I with our favorite docent, Emily. If any of you go to the Dulles Air and Space Museum on Wednesdays, you should ask for her! Ü

If you look very closely, you would notice that my little Carl’s head would barely fit out of the window opening on this plane. I don’t know how people could handle that for very long. I think I would go a little stir-crazy.

I thought that some of my family might appreciate this. The museum is just starting a restoration area and had this plane there at the time. It is the last plane from when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Emily told us that it was the plane that overlooked Hawaii to see all the damage that took place.

This was a plane that Emily showed us that the Japanese had just come up with towards the end of the war and was going to introduce it about two weeks after the war ended. The plan was to pack these planes into submarines and then take them by the masses to some of our major cities and attack. Obviously, that never took place and so when the war ended, the Japanese quickly tried to sink all of these planes to hide the proof. However, we retrieved the very last one and it is sitting in this museum.

I want to describe more to you, but I am horrible with terminology and such. I should have had Emily do a “guest” entry on our blog just so we could remember the many things we learned! Guess we will have to go again!