The Smithsonian at Dulles

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OVERKILL

OVERKILL

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Was there for about four hours today and got to see the SR-71, which I am extremely excited about. Definitely my favourite aircraft by a very wide margin.

Took a TON of pictures, will share a few of them here.

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The Udvar-Hazy center. Great museum!

Admission is free. Parking is $15.

You can take a regularly scheduled bus from the IAD terminal.

You pictured many of my favorites - Packard Engine and the F-14. Of course. As well as the SR-71. F-4U, and the Enola Gay.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: Astro14
The Udvar-Hazy center. Great museum!

Admission is free. Parking is $15.

You can take a regularly scheduled bus from the IAD terminal.


Yeah, it was great, three of us went, $5.00/each, what a bargain!

Anybody been to the nearby firearms museum? We are wondering if it is worth a drive out to?
 
If you go after 4pm, it's free parking. But I think they close at 5:30 or 6:30 so that doesn't give you much time.
 
Udvar rocks! I've been a few times. I used to have to go to Leesburg for training, Udvar is a great way to spend a day. Great pics OP!
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: Astro14
The Udvar-Hazy center. Great museum!

Admission is free. Parking is $15.

You can take a regularly scheduled bus from the IAD terminal.

Yeah, it was great, three of us went, $5.00/each, what a bargain!

Anybody been to the nearby firearms museum? We are wondering if it is worth a drive out to?

I live near Udvar-Hazy, and the NRA museum is right around the corner from me.
smile.gif


Udvar-Hazy is fantastic. I've been there a bunch of times since it opened so it's not the experience it once was for me but I still love it. Seeing an SR-71 in the flesh is an awesome experience, especially the way they have it placed right in front of you when you walk in and look down below the Corsair and the P-40. Same with the space shuttle. The Concorde is a favorite as is the Enola Gay which is somewhat 'creepy' to see the first time, knowing its history. Great place.

I went to the NRA museum for the first time only a few weeks ago, which is odd because it's within spitting distance from here. Cool place also with lots of old stuff and some really intricately detailed old guns, right up to relatively modern day firearms. Everything is in glass cabinets without much info presented right next to it; You need to go to a kiosk and put in a location code to read more details. It breaks up the 'flow' but I don't know how else the would have done it, really. The different eras are broken up into rooms so going through is like following a timeline. It's not that big, only about 2/3 of the bottom floor of one of their buildings. A lot of the older stuff (pre-1900 or thereabouts) does not do anything for me so I kind of breezed through the first half of it. I walked through it in a little more than an hour. It's not as awe-inspiring as Udvar-Hazy but I'm sure any firearm fan would enjoy it. Free parking and entry to boot.
 
The Air Force Museum in Fairborn near Dayton on a piece of the Wright-Patterson Air Force base is even better.
They've got your SR-71, but they also have the only surviving B-70 as well as an F-117 test article along with one of just about everything that ever flew in the USAF inventory as well as some space vehicles. That they didn't get a shuttle was a travesty that Ohio's congressional delegation really should have fixed.
Does the museum at Dulles named for some guy who founded a very successful airliner leasing company have a B-36, a B-47 and a B-52?
The one in Fairborn does, as well as an ME-262 and some other WW II Japanese and German aircraft.
I love both car and airplane museums. They're all wonderful to visit. The difference is that planes take up a whole lot more space, of course.
 
Originally Posted By: fdcg27
The Air Force Museum in Fairborn near Dayton on a piece of the Wright-Patterson Air Force base is even better.
They've got your SR-71, but they also have the only surviving B-70 as well as an F-117 test article along with one of just about everything that ever flew in the USAF inventory as well as some space vehicles. That they didn't get a shuttle was a travesty that Ohio's congressional delegation really should have fixed.
Does the museum at Dulles named for some guy who founded a very successful airliner leasing company have a B-36, a B-47 and a B-52?
The one in Fairborn does, as well as an ME-262 and some other WW II Japanese and German aircraft.
I love both car and airplane museums. They're all wonderful to visit. The difference is that planes take up a whole lot more space, of course.


They have a list of all the planes right on the Smithsonian website if you are interested
smile.gif
 
The list of inventory sounds really interesting although I question some of the selected aircraft.
I mean, a Cessna 152 or a Beech King Air or Model 18?
You can see those at most any GA airport anywhere in the Western World, although the Twin Beech is becoming a bit scarce.
Still a lot of neat stuff to see. IMHO, a Concorde beats an SR-71 any day of the week, since had we been a little quicker to spend large dollars we might have caught a Mach 2 ride to LHR or CDG but that time has passed.
Sounds like a must-visit place. Would be a nice weekend trip flying or a nice long weekend trip driving.
 
That's funny, one of the guys I was with was far more fascinated with the Concorde than the SR-71. I'm of course infatuated with the SR-71, as I love military history and that plane to me is the high point in American ingenuity; an absolutely unbelievable accomplishment when you consider the time period in which it was developed.

They had a lot of weird planes just hanging from the ceiling, many of them civilian craft like the ones you mentioned. They aren't taking up floor space really, the "attractions" are all on the floor, those planes are just there to fill space IMHO. It is a HUGE hangar.

They are currently restoring one of the jet powered WWII Nazi flying wings, will be interesting to see that when it is done.

I figure I'll probably drive back down here with the family at some point, as my kids would absolutely love this museum.
 
The Concorde could hit Mach 2 while its hundred or so passengers munched caviar on points of toast and washed that down with real Champaign. It was also of a design era not too far ahead of the Lockheed, which was of course much faster but was also far too temperamental and maintenance-intensive to be operated on anything close to the schedule that the Concorde was.
The XB-70 wasn't a whole lot slower than the SR-71 and it was intended to carry a large bomb load to some lucky Soviet city, so it approached the useful load of a practical transport and it is of the same technical vintage as is the SR-71. Two prototypes were built before program cancellation. One is at the Air Force Museum while the other was lost in a midair collision during a formation flight conducted as a photo op.
Lockheed had no monopoly on clever and innovative design.
The SR-71 is a fascinating aircraft, as is its predecessor, the U-2, basically a high-altitude jet-powered sailplane. The Air Force Museum has a U-2. The Smithsonian doesn't.
 
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