BGuthrie Photos: Udvar-Hazy Center -- Event: Pre-Opening Member Event

Udvar-Hazy Center -- Event: Pre-Opening Member Event:

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Description of Pictures: 2003/12/06: While the official public opening of the Udvar-Hazy Center is December 15, this was an Appreciation Day one-day pre-opening for donors and National Air and Space Society members. 11,000 or 12,000 people were registered to show up for at least part of the day. It happened to be the day after the first snowfall of the season which meant the staff had a decent test of snow-removal techniques as well as leakage in the massive roof. I arrived at about 9:45am. The doors opened at 10am but the security check meant that I didn't get into the building until 11am. There was a very brief formal presentation by Jack Dailey, the head of the museum, as well as by Joe Suarez, the head of the Air and Space Society. I got to see all of the facility over the next seven hours except for the observation tower which was too crowded for me to spend the time waiting to get up.
After awhile, the fact that food service wasn't available started to take its toll and the exhaustion started to get to me. A conveyor belt would have been a nice touch but I talked to Dailey afterward and he said it was too late for that -- they had to design the aisles to accommodate large cranes for positioning and servicing the crafts -- although they were thinking of doing some Pushman carts to ferry people around.
I took 1,775 pictures the first day which, even for me, is scary.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. AIRPRE_031206_006.JPG: Long lines awaited you for the pre-opening of the Udvar Hazy Center and it took me about and hour to get in. Luckily, I had come early. I don't know how long the folks at the end of this line had to wait. The first snowfall of the year had been the previous day and it was bit nippy. The spiral artwork in the center is the main sculpture at the museum. The panels on either side of the line are for contributor names.
2. AIRPRE_031206_008.JPG: Initially, only about a third of the air and spacecraft were on hand. Ultimately, there will be two additional layers of vehicles hanging from the ceiling above these Korean War-vintage craft.
3. AIRPRE_031206_018.JPG: Jack Dailey, the director of the Air and Space Museum
4. AIRPRE_031206_020.JPG: Joe Suarez, director of the Air and Space Society, the fan support group for the museum.
5. AIRPRE_031206_022.JPG: The size of things is hard to imagine. This welcoming band is positioned in front of hanger doors, which can open up to allow more craft in.
6. AIRPRE_031206_039.JPG: Tim Cronen, one of two who handles membership for the Air and Space Society.
7. AIRPRE_031206_183.JPG: This is copy of the Wright Brothers flier. On the official opening day of the Udvar-Hazy Center, it will glide across the hangar to inaugurate the new museum. Later, it was shipped to Kitty Hawk where it tried to repeat the Wright Brothers' flight. That event was basically rained out though and the craft couldn't be made to fly.
8. AIRPRE_031206_191.JPG: This guy, Mark J Ball, said he was the last pilot of the last Boeing 307 Stratoliner. He happened to be there for the opening and started signing photos of the plane that the museum had available.
9. AIRPRE_031206_208.JPG: Jack Dailey, director of the museum, on the left
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2003 photos: Equipment this year: I decided my Epson digital camera wasn't quite enough for what I wanted. Since I already had Compact Flash chips for it, I had to find another camera which used CF chips. That brought me to buy the Fujifilm S602 Zoom in March 2003. A great digital camera, I used it exclusively for an entire year. Trips this year: Three-week trip this year out west, mostly in Utah. Number of photos taken this year: 68,000.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].