Planes, helicopters and a shuttle

Unlike most of the Smithsonian museums, it's not easy to just swing by the Udvar-Hazy center, which is a branch of the Air and Space Museum. The giant open hanger features a number of notable aircraft, including an SR-71 and the space shuttle Enterprise.

There are obviously far more planes and the like on display, everything from old crop dusters and home-made ultralights to an F-14. Since the displays consist of lots of parked aircraft and almost nothing else, it can get a bit monotonous, but the hanger held my attention for a few hours, at least.

I had been thinking of stopping in at the center for a while, but since it's all the way out at Dulles Airport - about a 45-minute drive into Virginia, depending on traffic - it wasn't quite worth a drive for itself. This weekend, however, I found myself headed out toward Dulles for the final weekend of my Ultimate Frisbee league. After a morning loss, I had the afternoon free to check out the planes.

The obvious, featured planes are cool to see - the SR-71, the Enola Gay, the Concorde, the shuttle - and the sheer number of smaller planes kept my interest longer than I'd anticipated. I wish they'd done a bit more with one or two of the planes - I wanted to see the inside of the Concorde, rather than just stare at it from a few feet away. One of the coolest exhibits tucked away on the sides, at least for someone who grew up in the Top Gun generation, was an F-14 sitting right across from a MiG-21. (The MiG-21 wings are unbelievable short. Even more than most fighter planes, it looks like a rocket with a cockpit on the top. The wings are little more than small fins on the side - the entire wingspan is only about 20 feet across, which means the wings themselves are only a couple meters long.

The center also features a tower with views of the incoming Dulles traffic - the museum is maybe half a mile south of the airport's runways, so you can see the smoke kick up with each landing and look to the sky to see the planes lined up one after another until they disappear into the distance.

The tower also has a mock-up of an air traffic control center, complete with radio chatter and a radar screen. The radar and audio comes from Newark airport and it seemed to be about a 15-minute taped loop. I'm not sure how often the radar and audio is changed; I was doubtful it was ever changed at all, but the attendant commented on how they had to edit the Newark traffic. (He said the Newark airport was often disrupted by U.N. diplomat helicopters who didn't bother with the niceties of following the controllers. I have no idea if there's any truth to this.)

Since, I've found myself every so often putting on live Air Traffic Control chatter in the background. I don't know why; I can't really follow it, but I like the sounds.