We followed our tradition of going somewhere in the region for
Thanksigivng. This year we drove Thursday morning to Northern Virginia,
to see the new National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy
Center, ate dinner in Reston, stayed overnight in a hotel in
Herndon, and did
a little shopping on Black Friday.
Note -- click on the
thumbnails below to see larger images.
The Center, which opened in December, 2003, provides the space
needed to display lots of large airplanes and space artifacts. Its main
room is 
a half-cylinder about
250 yards long and
104 feet high that is full of aircraft. There are several elevated
walkways for better access to the planes. The center includes a
164-foot tall
observation tower
with a good view of Washington Dulles International Airport. There is
also a taxi-way
from the Airport to the Center for delivering aircraft.
We started with the observation tower. Because it was Thanksgiving,
we were spared the usual long lines. In fact, there was no line at all.
The floor below the observation level was a simulated aircraft control
center with an audio feed and display from the Newark Control Center
and
probably the 
strangest plane in the
Museum
is the
Langley
Aerodrome A (right photo). It was a contemporary of the Wright
Brothers airplane, but according to the museum placard it was "overly
complex, structurally weak,
and aeordynamically unsound". It never flew successfully. The next
highlight was the Enola Gay, which was suprisingly large. Then at the
south end of the hangar
was the elegant Concorde
(left photo). Its last flight was to the museum. We then went into the McDonnell
Space Hangar, which is the section of the center devoted to
spacecraft. Its centerpiece is the space shuttle Enterprise which was
used to test the aeordynamic characteristics of the shuttle. After the
recent Columbia accident, NASA removed a section (right photo) of the
leading edge of the Enterprise's starboard wing for impact testing.
There were many other interesting artifacts including the prototype for
the Mars Sojouner Rover. We then returned to the main hall and wandered
by numerous fighters from 
WWII and the Korean War. Finally we came
back to the center of the hall, and the amazing SR-71
Blackbird (left
photo). Like the
Concorde, its last
flight was to the museum. We were fortunate that a museum docent had
just started his talk about the aircraft when we reached it. The last
plane we examined was the Northrop
N-1M (right photo), which was designed and built in around 1940.
amenity was two live swans in its
atrium. We enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner (right photo) at the McCormick
& Schmick's seafood restaurant in Reston. After checking out of
the hotel Friday morning, we stopped on the way home to spend a couple
of hours with the rest of the hordes at the Tysons Corner Center, the
largest shopping mall in the area.