Wednesday, April 2, 2008

This past weekend while we were in Maryland, I ventured to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport. It was pretty cool. It's similar in a lot of ways to the Wright Patterson National Air Force Museum in Dayton.

They had a SR-71 Blackbird (the coolest plane in the world, btw) and a working prototype of the Space Shuttle. This particular one happens to be the third of the planes that I've seen (the others being in Dayton and on the USS Enterprise in New York). They never fail to impress. In the picture you can see it, as well as the nose of the shuttle in the background.

There was a large section devoted to space, which I thought was cool. I also got my first up close look at the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It looks similar to the Raptor, though unique because of it's VTOL capabilities. I'm still surprised that they opted to go with a single engine though.

Anyway, blah blah blah, planes planes planes, maybe I'll try to come up with more coherent thoughts later.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Come on, Tim, at least call it by its proper name! It's the Udvar-Hazy Center.

Yeah, can you believe the SR-71 is 46 years old!? First design flew in 1962. Just imagine the secret aircraft we could potentially have now!

That plane you saw was flown from California in a flight that took 68 minutes. It reached 2242mph on that flight.

Tim said...

That's exactly the same thoughts I have. If they had this stuff back then, I can't even imagine what they have now.

boilerdowd said...

I love thinking about the possibilities of what's next. Craziness.