On the military side, a trove of American, German, Japanese, Soviet, British and French warplanes from the two world wars joins such modern military wonders as a prototype of the new Joint Strike Fighter, which isn't even scheduled to join the American armory for several more years. There are also an Air France Concorde the Mobile Quarantine Facility used to house Apollo astronauts after they returned from the moon the prototype for the Boeing 707 one of the first Lear jets and a host of small record-setting racing planes. The Blackbird also holds the transcontinental air speed record, set in March 1990 on its retirement flight, when its pilots flew from California to Dulles in 1 hour, 4 minutes and 20 seconds, and turned the sleek black monster over to the Smithsonian to become part of the national collection. Visitors wandering the vast main hangar - three football fields long, 10 stories high and 287 feet wide - can already take in such treasures as the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the super-spy plane that could operate at 85,000 feet. Thirty-five spacecraft are in place, including the space shuttle Enterprise and a Gemini and Mercury space capsule, and that figure will rise to 135. The new three-tier center is home to 82 planes now, a total that will rise to 200 within four years as painstaking restoration on the Smithsonian's priceless collection of civilian and military aircraft continues.
If the visitor takes the 760,000-square-foot Udvar- Hazy (pronounced OOD-var HAH-zee) Center as nothing more than that, it's a spectacular addition to the Smithsonian's web of more than a dozen museums and the National Zoo in Washington. Instead, the $311 million museum, which opened last Dec.
Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport, the new branch of the Smithsonian Institution's wildly popular Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, isn't the place to come for answers to such historical, moral, even metaphysical questions, even though it is now the permanent home of the Enola Gay, known to the Army Air Force as plane Serial No.
It is named after Steven F.Udvar-Hazy, a Hungarian immigrant who made a fortune in aircraft leasing and donated a record $65 million toward the museum's construction. The futuristic complex exhibits dozens of vintage and historic flying machines including the Enola Gay, a Concorde and the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Udvar-Hazy Center, an addition to the popular Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, are shown in a wide-angle view against an early morning sky on the day of its dedication at Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va., Dec. SCOTT APPLEWHITE Show More Show Less 2 of12 TRAVEL VIRGINIA - The observation tower and entrance area of the new Steven F. Exhibition of the plane has always been controversial and Japanese survivors say they want the new exhibit to focus more on the suffering caused by the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Udvar-Hazy Center, in Chantilly, Va., Dec. 1 of12 TRAVEL VIRGINIA - The Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in World War II, stands amid dozens of vintage and historic aircraft in the cavernous interior of the newly dedicated Smithsonian National Air and Space Museums Steven F.