National Air & Space Museum  Washington DC, USA

The National Air & Space Museum consists of two separate museums. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport is the companion facility to the Museum on the National Mall. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world.

In this report the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center plays the main role, as this is the part of the museum I visited during our USA East Coast Tour in 2005. A full report of this tour can be found here. This part of the museum has a couple of nice highlights, like the SR-71 Blackbird and a real Space Shuttle, the Enterprise. Furthermore you will find here one of the prototypes of the new Joint Strike Fighter, the X-35B. This jet made its final test flight from Edwards AFB on August 6th 2001. One of my personal highlights was the B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay" which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.      (Click here for an inventory list)