All Stories

What does it take to organize a fly-in at the National Air and Space Museum?  Lots of time and lots of good friends!  As we head into our sixth year of Become a Pilot Day, it’s a great time to look back at how it all started and where we go from here. As a pilot myself, the idea of a fly-in was a no-brainer. 

Many visitors express the wish to see the interiors of aircraft and spacecraft on display in the Museum. But to protect these historic treasures, they must be displayed behind barriers, which makes it impossible to see inside. But there are several cockpits you can see in the Museum, a day devoted to getting up close with aircraft, some cool electronic views, and a couple of great books that give those who are curious some excellent interior views.

The notation in the Museum’s artifact database is simple: “On loan.”  But this artifact is a replica Nobel Prize.  And its loan involves two government agencies, a crushed storage building, and a flight to the International Space Station. Let’s start at the beginning – literally.  As in the Big Bang.

In view of Dom Pisano’s blog on the IMAX films, I thought I might offer some comment on what it is like to see yourself five stories tall on the BIG screen

When the National Air and Space Museum opened its doors in July 1976, it featured in its theater a film produced specifically for the Museum called To Fly in a large format called IMAX.

I teach an exhibition design course as an adjunct professor for the George Washington University’s Museum Studies program.  I tell my students I’ve got the best job in the world: designing exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. They often ask what you need to know to be an exhibit designer and how they can get there, too.

One of the things that makes being an educator here great is our teaching collection. I’m lucky, I work with a curatorial and collections staff that considers our needs as educators and provides the public with deaccessioned items they can touch and examine up close.   Our teaching collection currently contains real space food, shuttle tiles, bits of airplanes, meteorites, uniforms and other assorted items.  However, not all the items are real; our most popular replica is the shuttle era space suit.  The suit has been part of the Discovery Station Program for over ten years.  It was purchased with a grant from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee and is part of the Living and Working in Space Discovery Station, our most popular station, largely because of the suit.  The station gets an average of 40,000 visitors yearly, but that’s only a portion of the crowds the suit sees.  It has also become a key object used for family days, story times and school tours.

National Air and Space Museum staff are hard at work renovating the Pioneers of Flight gallery, scheduled to open later this year.  It will be filled with the fascinating stories of the colorful personalities of early aviation, including Jimmy Doolittle, Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, and Charles and Anne Lindbergh, plus Robert Goddard and other rocket pioneers.  One of the featured artifacts is the newly cleaned Lockheed Sirius Tingmissartoq, the dual cockpit plane that carried Charles and Anne Lindbergh on their exploratory trips across several continents in 1931 and 1933.  The trips made headlines and were the basis for two popular books written by Anne, North to the Orient and Listen, the Wind! Cognizant of their place in history, the Lindberghs carefully saved the majority of items they packed for the trips. Now after several decades in storage, many will be on display for the first time. 

The National Air and Space Museum is testing a new mobile website—the first at the Smithsonian! 

Pulling up stakes is always hard to do, especially if you’re packing up and moving a million plus documents, photographs, films, engineering drawings, tech manuals, and all the other treasures that make up the National Air and Space Museum's Archives Division. Starting in May, some of our reference and reproduction services will be suspended as we get ready for the move to our great new facilities at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center Phase Two. Right now, these are the affected services and the dates on which they’ll be suspended: