Flight Museum Floors Its First Visitors

When you’ve circled the Earth and stood on the moon, it takes a lot to be impressed. But John Glenn and Neil Armstrong gaped along with 2,000 others Thursday at the dozens of aviation marvels in a new second home for the National Air and Space Museum.

The huge museum, 28 miles west of the original’s home on the National Mall, opens Monday. It features everything from gliders to a sleek SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, its maximum speed still kept secret by the government.

Visitors gasped at the impressive collection: the Enola Gay, the Enterprise space shuttle, the Concorde, Amelia Earhart’s flight suit and various rockets, missiles, satellites, fighters and jetliners.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who presided over the dedication, called it “a monument to the great achievements of flight and to the even greater possibilities of the future.”

There were cheers and applause for some aviation pioneers: Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon; Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth; Scott Crossfield, the first to fly at Mach 2 and Mach 3; Burt Rutan, who designed Voyager, which flew nonstop around the world in 1986.

Paul Tibbetts, who commanded the Enola Gay, stood in front of the restored aircraft and chatted about his role aboard the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Museum officials avoided the controversy that grounded a 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay because it discussed the effects of the bomb. Japanese survivors said they wanted the exhibit to focus more on the damage of the atom bomb.

For Gale Fitzwater of Fairfax County, Va., the 82 restored aircraft and 61 large-space artifacts displayed reflected the amazing technological change that have occurred in her mother’s 94-year-lifetime.

“It’s just unbelievable,” she said. Added her husband, Mike, “This is just the single most amazing thing I’ve seen.”

It is estimated that 3 million people will visit the museum, next to Dulles International Airport, in its first year. The original Air and Space Museum, which will remain open, is the most visited museum in the world, averaging 9 million guests a year.