Nicholas and I had a chance to do a bit more exploring round our nation’s capital today. We did a bit of sightseeing northwest of the White House toward Georgetown and Rock Creek Park. The first one was the National Cathedral which is actually visible from Children’s National Medical Centre (you get a good view of it from the cafeteria on the west side of the building). You could spend a day there just looking at all of the gargoyles adorning the building which includes not only traditional gargoyles but even such pop-culture icons as Darth Vader! I kid you not! Those gargoyles actually serve a practical purpose other than scaring off birds and unwitting visitors. Gothic cathedrals have no gutters so the gargoyles and other architectural features serve as water diverters to allow water to drain from the roof! Guess those ancient engineers knew what they were doing after all which explains why most of the cathedrals in the world are still standing and didn’t have their roof implode like Kemper Arena’s did in Kansas City not long after Daddy moved to Ft. Sam Houston!
Not too far from Children’s and the Ronald McDonald House is another beautiful cathedral on the grounds of the Catholic University of America. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is not a Gothic cathedral but rather a gorgeous building that would probably be more at home in Spain. The tower in particular suggests the Moorish influence commonly seen in Spanish cathedrals (the Moors were Arabs who had conquered Spain from their base in North Africa until they were pushed back to Africa by Ferdinand and Isabella). It is a stunning sight, particularly at night when the basilica is lit to dramatic effect!
Next along the way to the south of the Cathedral was a quick drive past the US Naval Observatory. Not only is the USNO home to the Navy’s astronomical research divisions and telescopes (the stars have always been important to sailors through the ages), the nation’s standard atomic clocks are housed here. The grounds of the USNO are also home to the official residence of the Vice President of the United States and you won’t have a problem seeing the part of the observatory grounds closest to Dick Cheney’s house…it is heavily fortified and can withstand an assault by even heavily armored vehicles.
As you drive round the observatory, you start to get into some very exclusive areas in the District leading into Embassy Row which, like it’s name implies, is home to most of the diplomatic corps based in Washington. The US State Department isn’t too far from here with the headquarters located in Foggy Bottom.
A bit further along the Rock Creek Parkway (which is a gorgeous way to see northwestern Washington!), we came upon the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It’s a bit weird seeing that beautiful building and developed Washington after driving through Rock Creek Park which is about as unspoiled as the District is ever going to get. Approaching the Kennedy Center from the north, you literally drive out from under some massive oaks and then the building is right in front of you.
Not too far from the Kennedy Center is the Watergate Hotel. The hotel is also near Foggy Bottom which was home to the break-in that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. The whole Watergate saga did have it’s unintentional moments of irony…the burglary was orchestrated by operatives of the Committee to Re-Elect the President and one of the two official acronyms was CREEP (the other was CRP). I’m telling you folks, truth is really stranger than fiction! The buildings are fairly unremarkable and it’s easy to miss that you’re close to the site that would eventually be one of the reasons for our only presidential resignation.
Of course, my ever-vigilant co-pilot Nicholas slept through all of these sights! Oh, well…
Our real destination was the new Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Steven F. Udvar-Hazy museum annex near Dulles International Airport which is well west of the District and about a forty-five minute to an hour drive from Children’s. If you want to beat the tolls, get to I-66 and take the airport-only lanes, do the loop through the airport and past that famous terminal building, and then take exit 9 just outside of the airport toward the south. Udvar-Hazy is about three miles from there on the far side of the airport grounds.
Yeah, I’ll admit it…this trip definitely a scratch Daddy’s itch trip but we figured Nicholas would probably enjoy seeing the planes. After all, he’s always looking to the sky when a plane or helicopter flies near the house and is awfully good at zeroing in on where the plane actually is. Yeah…that’s my boy! And yes, you can well imagine that at least one set of his flash cards in the future will be aircraft profiles for identification. (Real aviation geeks can tell the difference between aircraft types by listening to the engines and ones who are seriously in need of a life (like Daddy!) can tell you what airline the plane belongs to based on the sound of the engine! I kid you not…the JT8-D engines on a Delta 727 sounded much better maintained than any of American’s 727’s which always had that high-pitched whistle coming off the exhaust sections indicating excess air was being bypassed round the fan stages. Yeah, I spent enough time listening to them landing at Orlando International and yes, I probably needed a real life but hey, it was one of the cheaper forms of entertainment available in Orlando to a college student on a limited budget! And for a big fan of Boeing’s commercial aircraft, the observation area at Frontage Road just across the Bee-Line Expressway from runways 18L and 18R was a target-rich environment and I’ve got the pictures to prove it!).
Anyway, the building itself is an enormous hangar and control tower located just south of one of the active runways at Dulles which made it easy to bring in most of the aircraft. Admission to America’s Hangar itself is free but the parking is $12. It’s quite a bargain when you consider some of the most famous aircraft in the world are housed in that building. By this point, Nicholas was quite awake and he literally went into overload pointing at all of the planes. It’s one thing to spot a lone plane going over the house but here was a fleet of them!
I’ll admit that I’m a big Boeing fan and I knew going out there that the Enola Gay was on display at the annex. She’s one of the exceptions to the usual delivery method because she was crated after her last flight and put into storage to protect the plane from the elements. This B-29 was our first stop in the museum and it was somehow fitting to start with a symbol of just what terrible things we as a species are capable of. Of course, we all know what this Martin-built B-29’s mission was over Japan back in August of 1945. I think it’s safe to say that the world has never been the same since that atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and looking at the plane that was the delivery vehicle is more than a little surreal. One cannot help but think about the stubborn pride of the Japanese High Command that ensured that Enola Gay wouldn’t end WWII (it would take a second bomb being dropped on Nagasaki by Bock’s Car a couple of days later). Then there is the thought of the Cold War that would last almost fifty years with the world wondering who would be the next one to employ these terrible weapons in war and the sad knowledge that the genie isn’t ever going back into that bottle again. Here is Nicholas pointing innocently at Enola Gay and saying “plane” over and over and I was honestly wishing for something that can never be again…that innocence of not knowing what life is like where the threat of nuclear weapons is a very real one (and one could argue that it’s even more of a threat now than it was during the darkest days of the Cold War!). I would hope that anyone who would be of a mind to use these terrible weapons would pause and consider Enola Gay and the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before doing something really stupid.
Twice should be enough for any species to figure out what a gift to future generations it would be to give those generations the innocence of a child who doesn’t really know what humans are capable of doing to other humans with nuclear (or other kinds of) weapons.
It never ceases to amaze me that the terrible ingenuity of man can also achieve such great things in advancing the quality of life. One of the examples of this ingenuity was a personal surprise for me because I didn’t think that the Boeing 367-80 “Dash-80” was on display here. Last I had heard, Boeing had flown her to Seattle for restoration and display at the Seattle Museum of Flight. This bird which was the prototype for the Boeing 707 that would revolutionize commercial aviation was the stuff of legends, a flying testbed for all sorts of new technologies. The most famous Dash-80 story is Tex Johnston (one of Boeing’s most famous test pilots) barrel-rolling this big plane over the Gold Cup course at Lake Washington near Seattle. Imagine for a moment…William Allen (then CEO of Boeing) was betting more than the net worth of the company on this one plane and is watching Tex roll the plane twice over the course. The legend is that Bill Allen leans over to Larry Bell and asks him for some of his heart pills because he needed them more than Larry did. Larry knew Tex Johnston (Tex worked for Bell Aircraft before moving to Boeing) and told Allen that he didn’t know Tex and that Tex had just sold your airplane. He was quite right because he wasn’t the only one watching that stunt…Juan Trippe of Pan-Am was in the audience and would ultimately order 707’s after seeing just how tough that plane was. Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines heard of the roll and ordered 707’s as well (and talk about signs of the times…neither Pan-Am or Eastern survived deregulation!). (As an aside, Tex would later explain to Bill Allen and the other bosses that as long as 1G is maintained throughout the roll, the forces involved are nothing more than what you’d expect in level flight… in other words, the plane never knows it’s inverted! There is a famous picture shot from the cabin windows that shows the engine pods facing the sky over the lake…boy, would I have loved to be in the jump seat for that roll!). Tex Johnston, Dix Loesch, Ed Wells, Bill Allen, Tex Bouillion…these are some of the heroes of Boeing that were my idols in my younger years. And a lot of them were working at Boeing when Model 367-80 was on the drawing boards…the plane that would change the commercial industry forever.
Another idol of mine was Lockheed’s Clarence “Kelly” Johnson who is also well represented in the annex with the P-38 Lightning and his most famous accomplishment with the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever designed, the Mach-3 SR-71. Kelly Johnson’s famous Skunk Works (named because his design shop was located next to a noxious plastics fabrication plant) would also be responsible for the U-2 and the F-117 Stealth Fighter.
A couple of other notable aircraft are the Aerospatiale Concorde (only supersonic commercial aircraft ever deployed to passenger service) and the Space Shuttle orbiter test vehicle Enterprise (OV-101) which was used to test re-entry characteristics of the Space Shuttle (the conclusion, it’s a billion-dollar brick but it’s design criterion to land like a conventional aircraft was well satisfied even if it’s unpowered flight after re-entry!). I can tell you that nothing wakes you up as quickly on a Sunday morning as a space shuttle does when you hear that characteristic double sonic boom as the shuttle slows to subsonic speed over the Sanford (Florida) airport (where they make the decision to press on to Kennedy Space Center or bingo to Orlando International’s 12,000-foot runways!).
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and it was time to leave and experience the evening rush hour traffic which is a highly overrated experience.
But I think it’s a safe assumption that Nicholas loved looking at all of the planes and rockets on display…and an even safer assumption that Daddy really loved the experience. It’ll be nice to go back to the Air and Space Museums with the boys and share with them some of the cool stories behind the hardware. Hopefully they’ve completed the renovations to the original museum on the National Mall (home to the Spirit of St. Louis among other things)!