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Situated next to Dulles International Airport, the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center forms an annex to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and plays host to items and aircraft that were too big for the main site on the National Mall.
It’s somewhere I might have missed entirely if not for a glowing recommendation from an Uber driver earlier in the trip. It might not have the original Wright brothers plane, but the collection in Chantilly, Virginia is arguably even better than the main museum. It’s a must for any aerospace fans, and it’s perfectly situated for a quick visit before a flight out of DC.
Stepping inside the first of the two huge hangars that house the collection, I’m greeted by hundreds of artefacts from the age of flight, arranged across an enormous space and suspended from the ceilings.
I go along the elevated walkways to get a closer look at some of the machines, which span the full range of eras and uses, and follow them round to the workshop area of the museum, where I peer in at experts as they restore old aircraft to their former glory.
The museum is less busy than its sister site, but is still popular with young families and tourists marvelling at some of history’s most recognisable aircraft. Many of the exhibits have their roots in the military. There are US helicopters from the Vietnam War era, and fighter jets with their famous shark-tooth nose art. There’s an F-14 Tomcat fighter, and a tour guide fires questions at a school group about the film that made it famous (answer: Top Gun, of course).
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The star of this section is the looming all-black silhouette of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, but I’m particularly stunned by the shining metal shape of Enola Gay – the B-29 bomber that dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima.
On the civilian side, icons such as Concorde draw a crowd, while some of the more outlandish aircraft used for attempts at solo flight are fascinating. There are gliders and balloons that were flown in the early days, plus the capsule in which Felix Baumgartner rose to 39km above the Earth’s surface before jumping from the edge of space.
The second hangar, at the back of the museum, is devoted to moving beyond our atmosphere. The main attraction here is the space shuttle Discovery, which was flown to its final resting place on the back of a plane.
This giant of space travel is magnificent up close. The black-and-white colouring resolves itself into thousands of thermal tiles, while the jet boosters seem impossibly large, looming overhead.
In the same room, I look at more of the details of space missions – from the scorched space shuttle nose cone that was replaced every few flights to the preserved remains of insects that were sent up to study the effects of low gravity on various life forms. It turns out that spiders spin their webs differently in outer space. On the day I visited in July there was even a former astronaut, Thomas Jones, signing autographs.
Also fascinating are the small models showing the different designs that were considered for the shuttle before the final one was chosen, and some of the other equipment that was used around the missions. This includes the mobile quarantine unit, a silver trailer that housed the astronauts from the Apollo missions on their return to Earth, an unused iteration of the lunar module LM-2, and the space suit that Neil Armstrong wore when he became the first man on the Moon in 1969.