Take Flight!

Alright, we’re back. We did get the camera back the other day, but this blog post comes from last weekend, and the pictures were therefore taken with my phone… we had to work with what we had. We have had a few things on our list of what we still wanted to see while we're here in the DC area, so this was one of mine. For some time I’ve been wanting to make it out to Dulles, VA to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s larger facility where they keep the big flying contraptions. So we took a drive out there and got to see some cool stuff.

This was really what I wanted to see. The Smithsonian currently has the Space Shuttle Enterprise, a never-been-to-Space Shuttle. It was the model used in high altitude tests before the shuttle program began, and has been in this hanger for the past three decades. Now that the shuttle program has ended, it’s going to be shipped off somewhere else and replaced with Discovery, the program’s fleet leader. I find this all very exciting, if you didn’t know.

I didn’t know this plane was out there, and while it’s definitely an important part of history, it’s somewhat strange to put on display a product of human ingenuity that was used to cause one of the single-most destructive events in human history. The Enola Gay, of course, was the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and killed maybe as many as 150,000 people with a single act. A necessary evil at the time… possibly. I had to wonder what a Japanese tourist would think of it. But it was definitely interesting to see it.

But enough with the gloomy stuff, of course there were a lot of cool planes out there, like this F-14 Tomcat! Here you see Goose and Maverick checking it out with their mom. And notice how tall Maverick is... it won't be long before he won't need to be standing on that post to catch up to his mom... but let's hope it takes a while.

So good stuff, and we can check the Air and Space Museum off our list. Now I guess it’s on to more!