DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight:
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GAL100_970215_01.JPG: Air & Space Museum; Spirit of St Louis
Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis hangs from the ceiling in the main lobby of the National Air & Space Museum.
GAL100_970709_01.JPG: Air & Space Museum; Spirit of St Louis
Another view of the Spirit of St Louis at the Air and Space Museum.
GAL100_971113_01.JPG: Air & Space Museum; Wright Brothers
Here's the Wright Brothers' plane. There had been some controversy over this. One of its directors, Samuel P Langley, had been competing with the Wright Brothers to build the first flyable plane. None of Langley's stayed in the air long enough to count though and the Wright Brothers achieved the first powered flight at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina on December 17 1903.
Langley was devastated by this but accepted defeat. The Smithsonian itself was less gracious. After Langley died, they asked the Wright Brothers to donate one of their later planes for exhibit at the Smithsonian. The museum then displayed that plane with an earlier non-working Langley plane, leaving the impression that Langley's was the original flying machine. With Smithsonian approval, a competitor to the Wright's modified Langley's plane, using the Wright Brothers' successful design, and then flew the revised Langley plane to establish it as the true original. Fortunately, photographic records proved this to be a farce.
Underneath, you can see a recovered space capsule. The wide white craft underneath and behind the Wright Brothers' plane is a craft that made it around the world without refueling.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Description of Subject Matter: Milestones of Flight
July 1, 1976 – 2021
This gallery features famous airplanes and spacecraft that exemplify the major achievements in the history of flight.
Highlights include:
* Mercury Friendship 7: the first manned orbiting flight, carrying John Glenn, Feb. 20, 1962
* Gemini IV: the first U.S. space walk by Edward H. White II, June 3-7, 1965
* Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia: 1st manned lunar landing, 1969, carrying Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins
* Goddard Rockets: a full-scale model of the world's 1st liquid propellant rocket, flown on March 16, 1926, and a large rocket constructed in 1941 by Robert Goddard, father of American rocketry
* Bell XS-1 (X-1) Glamorous Glennis: 1st manned flight faster than the speed of sound, flown by Chuck Yeager, Oct. 14, 1947
* Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis: Lindbergh's plane for 1st solo trans-atlantic non-stop flight 1927
* Explorer I: back-up model of 1st U.S. satellite to orbit the earth, 1958
* Sputnik I: Russian replica of 1st artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, 1957
* North American X-15: 1st winged, manned aircraft to exceed 6 times the speed of sound and the 1st airplane to explore the fringes of space, 1967
* Mariner 2: model of 1st spacecraft to study another planet when it flew by Venus, launched Dec. 14, 1962
* Pioneer 10 (prototype): 1st spacecraft to fly by Jupiter and 1st aircraft to venture beyond the planets, launched March 3, 1972
* Viking Lander: an unmanned proof test capsule used in ground tests before and during the Viking flights to Mars in 1976
* Bell XP-59A Airacomet (#1 of 3): 1st American turbojet aircraft, direct ancestor to all American jet aircraft, flown by Robert M. Stanley, Oct. 1, 1942
* Breitling Orbiter 3 Balloon Gondola: 1st balloon to fly around the world nonstop in 1999
* SpaceShipOne: 1st privately built and operated vehicle to reach space
A major renovation is now underway. The new Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, to be ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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2020_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (5 photos from 2020)
2019_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (41 photos from 2019)
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2012_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (19 photos from 2012)
2010_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (21 photos from 2010)
2008_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (4 photos from 2008)
2007_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (5 photos from 2007)
2005_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (35 photos from 2005)
2003_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (13 photos from 2003)
2002_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (15 photos from 2002)
1999_DC_SIAIR_Gall100A: DC -- Natl Air and Space Museum -- Gallery 100: (a) Milestones of Flight (2 photos from 1999)
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland.
From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera.
From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on).
In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year.
In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded.
Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints.
The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted.
Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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