Size Matters:  Museum Will Eventually House 200 Aircraft

By ANN Correspondent Rob Milford

• Read Part One
• Read Part Two
• Read Part Three

How big is it? 346,774 square feet. That’s 346 times the size of my apartment.  This is a big place. They can put their building from the mall inside here, no sweat. They will eventually have more than 200 aircraft on display. Now, they have 82. I continued my stroll last Friday through the facility. My feet were getting tired, but it was worth every step.

I thought I had seen all the “historic” aircraft. Not quite. Unlike most museums, with aircraft parked on the floor, the planes here are flying on wires suspended at a dozen different levels. There are walks across the center and the length of the hangar that put you at nose or cockpit height, and you’re 30 or 40 feet off the floor. Leo Loudenslager's Laser 200, complete with Bud Light logos, is nose up, in the middle of his routine, between snap rolls. You know that some Congressman wants those logos gone, saying they promote drinking. I think that’s exactly what Bud Light wanted when they paid Leo to fly at airshows. The Congressman might also feel that having an F-4 Phantom there promotes shooting down North Vietnamese aircraft.

A Piper PA-18 Super Cub is flying patrol for the Atomic Energy Commission.  The Grumman G-22 Gulfhawk is screaming through the air, the orange paint brighter than the sun, and Suzanne Asbury-Oliver’s’ Travel Air D4D Pepsi Skywriter is between letters, since there’s no smoke coming from the manifold.

There are the other, rare one-of-a-kind planes like the MacCready Gossamer Albatross, that weighs almost nothing, but proved that man could fly…under his own power. There is a flock of ultra light and hang gliders. Names like Delta Wing Phoenix VI and Delta Wing Viper. There’s a Bucker Bu-133C Jungmeister, and Art Scholl’s DHC-1A Super Chipmunk, in that wonderful red-and-white striped paint.

There’s at least one noteworthy racer in the place. Conquest 1. What started out as a Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat, became one of the fastest prop-driven aircraft of all time. The American Eagle paint scheme still rates as one of the most unique ever taken to the skies.

You might have noticed some names repeating themselves through the narrative. As of this writing, there are a total of 5 Grumman aircraft, 6 Boeing planes, 4 from Lockheed, and three from North American. McDonnell-Douglas, Northrop and Republic have but a single entry at this point.

I moved on to the Space exhibits. You already know about the Enterprise being the centerpiece at the McDonnell Space Hangar. The Gemini Capsule from GT-7 is on display. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell did a total of 220 spins in 14 days, the longest US space flight until Skylab, and something that most current shuttle flights don’t even approach. Wing sections are off the Enterprise right now, they’ve been used for testing to determine damage from debris to help find a cause for the loss of the Columbia earlier this year. There’s a Mercury Capsule, the second one that Alan Shepard was set to fly in 1963, before that mission got scrubbed. Since the Space Hangar is not finished, the major exhibits are on the main display floor.

They are impressive.

You have your Airstream trailer, renamed the “Mobile Quarantine Facility, where Apollo 11 Astronauts were housed after their mission, to make sure they didn’t infect this planet with any Moon germs. You have a set of models, 6 and 8 feet tall, of Delta, Atlas, Titan IIIC, and H-I, H-II and Ariane rockets. There’s the actual “Mother Ship” from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, or CE3K as we called in when they were shooting around Mobile, Alabama back in ‘76. You have a Spacelab from the backend of the shuttle, plus a transfer tunnel, and add-on instrument section. There is the #2 Bell Rocket Belt, and huge computers used by NASA and the Air Force back in the 60’s…your PDA has more power and capacity, trust me. They’re almost there as comic relief.

The flock of missiles ranges from Talos and Styx, Sidewinder to Falcon. There’s Tiny Tim, and a Sparrow. There’s Mighty Mouse and an ASAT. A Sam-2 and a Zuni. And the list continues. Many more Space artifacts are in waiting for the opening of the McDonnell Hangar, late spring of ’04. That will open up even more floor space for exhibits in the main hangar.

In going through the four pieces, there are some aircraft that got short shrift, or got left out. Sorry about that. I need to apologize to a Sukhoi 26M, a Rutan VariEze, the friendly yellow and black of a Piper J-3 Cub, the Bede BD-5B, the Grob 102 Standard Astir III and the Curtiss 1A Gulfhawk. There are a dozen other’s that didn’t get mentioned, including the P51C Mustang “Excalibur III” that made it’s own name in the sky, and somehow, I just didn’t see it… or didn’t make a note in the notebook. My Mustang-crazed buddy Chris will never forgive me.

To sum it all up… the Sigma, if you will, this is the museum that we have all been waiting for. This is the pilgrimage spot that will call us for years. As they more than triple the number of aircraft on display, the arrangements will change, some others will be shuffled between the Mall and Dulles. The eventual plan is to move the entire restoration facility from Silver Hill to Dulles, and then tours will take us “behind the scenes” without getting wet, frozen or drenched in sweat. On my three tours, I have been all three.

There is room for expansion past that. After all, history is made almost every day by some aircraft, and look at the Air Force Museum and how they’ve grown in the 30 years since the first “Big Hangar” opened. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center has 2,000 parking spaces, and they expect about 10,000 people a day, three and a half million people per year, compared with 9 million downtown, on the mall. There is also a shuttle bus service between the two locations.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Udvar-Hazy, for forking out some serious money -- $65,000,000.00 -- to preserve and protect our common aviation history. That the son of an immigrant did this is not a surprise. We are a nation of immigrants who embrace all that this country is, both good and bad. The fact that he has money and loves airplanes and aviation is why his name is over the door. In fairness, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Airbus, Northrop-Grumman and Bombardier are in the list of the top 20 contributors, but in the troubled times, post 9/11, only Fed-Ex came up with major dollars of a contribution.

FMI: www.nasm.si.edu/museum/udvarhazy