December 13 -- Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, VA

After a delicious breakfast of muffins and Chris’s special eggs, I left Charlottesville for the Smithsonian Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, near Dulles airport. This is a phenomenal new annex to the National Air & Space Museum, a hangar one football field wide and three long, filled with important and unusual air and spacecraft.

One half of the main hall. The silver aircraft is a controversial exhibit, the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Visitors try to throw bood or paint on this aircraft from time to time, and the security around the plane is very tight as a result.

Another view of the main hall with the supersonic Concorde airliner.

This view features the very first American – and the first successful -- passenger jet, the Boeing 707.

I took an overview tour which disappointed because a fair amount of the information provided by the docent was not correct. Nonetheless, if you go, it’s still worth taking the tour, which highlights most of the important planes. It’s really exciting to see that there’s still tons of room for more exhibits!

Below are a few more examples of the amazing exhibits:



The Space Shuttle Enterprise with the smallest manned space craft – a space suit in which an American astronaut flew around the space shuttle untethered.

Astronauts’ underwear!


Dornier Do 335 Arrow. This remarkable push-pull plane may have had the first ejection seat in an aircraft. Before ejecting, the pilot had to use a small, pre-installed bomb to blow off the back half of the aircraft so as not to be hit by the rear propeller upon exit. This is the only plane of this type remaining in the world.

Arado AR 234 Lightning. This is the only remaining example of this early German jet bomber.

Both innovative German aircraft.


Northrop N-1M flying wing. This is the first true flying wing with no tail. It took to the air on July 3, 1940.

Here’s the flying wing from above, parked next to a rare Northrop P-61C Black Widow WWII night fighter. This particular plane was used for weather research, flying into and around storms to gather data.

The museum’s new Lockheed Constellation, still being painted and restored.


This was the first plane to complete a solo-pilot, nonstop flight around the world. It's a Scaled Composites Global Flyer. Steve Fossett, the millionaire adventurer who recently went missing in an experimental plane, completed the flight in March 2005. The plane was designed by Burt Rutan, who also designed Spaceship One, featured at EAA, in Seattle, and (the original) at the Air & Space in D.C.


1930’s Boeing Stratoliner, the first pressurized airliner.

Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

The nicest Russian Mig-21 I saw on the trip.

F-4 Phantom.

The only JSF X-35 (Joint Strike Fighter) of the trip.

One fun feature of the museum is a control tower that looks out over the Dulles runways. Because of rain, fog and time constraints, I didn’t make it to the top, but I bet it’s great!