#Udvar hazy enola gay tv
If you're not headed anywhere near Northern Virginia anytime soon, check out the gallery above for a closer look at these incredible aircraft.Īs well as covering TV and other display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, massive aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000 mile road trips, and more. With the main Air and Space Museum closing for most of 2022, this is a great way to see some of the most important aircraft on display anywhere. Conversely, if you're just visiting the city and don't have a car, it's a bit of a trek. The museum itself is free, but you'll have to pay for that parking. Perhaps the best part of the Udvar-Hazy Center is that it's not in DC, which means you don't need to worry about finding parking. Highways to the horizon: A 10,000-mile road trip around the US.Chrome dome: The Cold War bombers of the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum.
Fast bombers and sleek fighters at the Wings Over the Rockies Museum.Cargo haulers of the sky at the Air Mobility Command Museum.It's astounding to imagine astronauts Jim Lovell and Frank Borman orbiting the Earth in 1965 - more than 200 times - in something smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. Nearby are some other spacecraft, including the Gemini 7 capsule. It dominates its own hangar, and I'm reminded how huge the Shuttles actually are. Then there's Discovery, the workhorse of the Shuttle fleet with more launches than any other spacecraft. No worries: I've seen a few Concordes, including one at the Technik Museum Sinsheim in Germany next to its Russian counterpart, the Tupolev Tu-144.
#Udvar hazy enola gay plus
The Enola Gay itself is raised off the floor, near a walkway so you can see it from all sides.īeyond is the the Dash-80, the prototype for the Boeing 707, plus an Air France Concorde and a Lockheed Super Constellation.ĭuring my visit some aircraft, including the Concorde, were shrouded in protective plastic as the museum made repairs to its roof. Also close by are several ultra-rare German aircraft from the end of WWII, like the first jet bomber, the Arado Ar 234, and the push-pull twin-engine Dornier Do 335. I'll get there in a minute.Ī mix of WWII aircraft, from a P-38 to a P-61, are arranged near the Enola Gay. The museum's SR-71 Blackbird, a spectacular Cold War reconnaissance plane, points at the entrance and acts as a vanguard for the Space Shuttle Discovery that sits behind it in its own room. This end of the museum has a mix of fighter aircraft, mostly jets from the latter half of the 20th century. It imparts a feeling of motion and life to an inherently static experience.ĭown a long ramp you're greeted by one of the few surviving aircraft that was at Pearl Harbor, a Sikorski JRS-1. Step beyond the lobby onto a platform at the center of the main hangar, and aircraft spread out to your left and right and hang directly in front of you, as if in flight. The Udvar-Hazy Center, named for the aviation billionaire whose donation enabled the Smithsonian to build it, has one of the most impressive entrances to any museum I've been to. +41 more See all photos Hangars of history