Exterior of the new (since 12/03) Dulles Annex of the National Air & Space Museum in Sterling, VA.
The faux control tower. Jacob and I ventured up to the top. The glassed-in level at the top affords a view of about half of Dulles Int'l Airport and its runways. You can also see forests and scattered office buildings, but there isn't much else.
Parade of mostly empty slates leading to the wispy sculpture at the end. I can't tell you what the tablets were for, we didn't look too closely. This is opposite the main entrance and it bisects the main parking lot.
A Pitts Special aerobatic airplane hangs overhead in the entrance hall.
This begins the pictures of planes in the main hall (hanger). The Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird is (I believe) the fastest airplane to have flown across the country (that we know of, of course.) I remember the news when this plane made its last flight here in 1990, crossing the country from LA to DC in just over an hour.
Another head-on view of the Blackbird.
Vought F4U-1D Corsair, adorned in the Navy's sea blue, intermediate blue and insignia white camouflage colors. You might recall these were the planes used by Colonel Boyington's "Black Sheep" squadron in World War II.
Overview of the Cold War gallery of the building. That is a UH-1 "Huey" Vietnam-era helicopter in front, with a McDonnell F-4S Phantom II on the right behind it and a (I think) a Russian MiG-21 Fishbed on the left. You can also see a North American F-86A Sabre and a MiG-15 behind them.
Another view of the Corsair. I really love those colors.
The "knife's edge" as it were.
Not something you wanted to see on your "six" during a patrol.
The boy, for scale. It's interesting how much the MiG-15 and the Sabre had similar characteristics. They wouldn't have copied us? Nah. The MiG-21 here is actually a repainted Chinese F-2 version of the MiG-15.
Big missile go "boom".
These are the contents of the "Humanitarian Daily Ration" kits dropped in massive quantities over Afghanistan three years ago. It was an effort to show the Afghanis we were bombing that we were the "good guys", a questionable effort, to say the least. The contents were designed to be "culturally sensitive". I'm not entirely sure why these are displayed here.
The first of several pictures of various engines. This is a 1912 Hall-Scott A1 inline four cylinder engine.
