supersonic airliner

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

Rockets, meanwhile, were starting to punch their way right through the stratosphere, leaving NOx and more in their wake – and if the Earth was really on the brink of a ‘space age’, there were going to be a lot more rockets. From the mid-1960s onwards the possibility that rockets and jets might damage the ozone layer on a global scale was being looked at by scientists, by military planners and by concerned environmentalists. In 1970 America decided not to go ahead with the development of supersonic airliners. It was a crucial moment in environmental history – the first time that, in part because of public concerns about the environment, a futuristic technology of the sort that had long enlivened the covers of popular science and science fiction magazines was deliberately foregone. Fears about the health of the stratosphere played only a part in this – by the time there was plausible scientific evidence of the damaging effects of the proposed airliners’ exhaust, the programme was already doomed by its cost and by a more immediate, if less global, environmental concern about sonic booms.

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Fears about the health of the stratosphere played only a part in this – by the time there was plausible scientific evidence of the damaging effects of the proposed airliners’ exhaust, the programme was already doomed by its cost and by a more immediate, if less global, environmental concern about sonic booms. But continuing research that built on what Johnston and Paul Crutzen – a wily and astute atmospheric chemist who, a couple of decades later, introduced the term ‘Anthropocene’ into science’s vocabulary – had discovered about NOx showed that a fleet of 500 supersonic airliners would reduce stratospheric ozone levels by 10–20 per cent worldwide. The idea that the ozone layer was fragile, and that human activity could significantly affect a fundamental part of the earthsystem, was firmly established. In the end, though, it was not through the nitrogen oxides produced by jet exhausts that humans began to do serious damage to the ozone layer.

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Because nitrous oxide is stable enough to stay around for decades, it has time to drift up to the stratosphere – where, in the presence of ultraviolet light, it finally breaks down into NOx compounds that attack the ozone. The first studies of chemical harm to the ozone layer by Paul Crutzen and Harold Johnston looked at just this problem, though they imagined the NOx coming from fleets of supersonic airliners. The airliners never materialized; the world’s concern shifted, rightly, to CFCs. But now CFC emissions have been slashed and their presence in the stratosphere has plateaued; emissions of nitrous oxide, on the other hand, are continuing to grow. As a result, nitrous oxide emissions, mostly from farmlands, are now doing more to slow the ozone layer’s recovery than emissions of any other anthropogenic chemical.

Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
by John Newhouse
Published 16 Jan 2007

It’s very difficult to establish trust.”15 For now, the conventional wisdom supports the skeptics. Risk-averse Japanese suppliers do have a very good deal with Boeing, and they might be content to await a new cycle in technology, one that showed signs of moving industry toward a cost-effective supersonic airliner. “We have to decide whether to take a bigger part in engine development, or whether to leapfrog the current generation [of aircraft] and jump ahead to the supersonic technology, since the U.S. and the Europeans are ignoring this sector,” said one industry executive.16 Suppose that Boeing, for whatever reason, ended its privileged association with Japan.

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“We have to decide whether to take a bigger part in engine development, or whether to leapfrog the current generation [of aircraft] and jump ahead to the supersonic technology, since the U.S. and the Europeans are ignoring this sector,” said one industry executive.16 Suppose that Boeing, for whatever reason, ended its privileged association with Japan. Would Airbus abandon one or more of its “centers of excellence” so as to acquire similar arrangements with Japan’s aircraft industry? We are unlikely to know, since it’s unlikely to happen and hard to imagine, unless, that is, Japan should elect to develop a supersonic airliner and choose a partner, like Airbus, that can draw on direct financial help from partner governments. Meanwhile, Airbus will continue to do what it has always done—outsource a huge array of components and subsystems, many of them to American and Chinese suppliers. Until recently, the received wisdom was that Airbus, unlike Boeing, wouldn’t outsource core competences, partly because of the jobs that would leave and partly because of a reluctance to help any supplier become a competitor.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
by Rowland White and Richard Truly
Published 18 Apr 2016

Nixon flew to the Portuguese mid-Atlantic outpost aboard a Boeing VC-137, a specially appointed presidential version of the 707 airliner known as Air Force One. Painted in an elegant sky-blue and white livery, the jet usually bestowed bragging rights upon the US president in any company. But that Sunday, December 12, Pompidou arrived in Lajes aboard Concorde 001, the first prototype of the needle-nosed Anglo-French supersonic airliner. The appearance that America was lagging behind the Europeans embarrassed the US president, who had been disappointed a year earlier when Congress had strangled the country’s own supersonic transport project. At dinner on Monday night Nixon observed that Pompidou’s journey to the Azores had been three times quicker than his own.

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• • • NASA had tried, without ever being entirely convincing, to justify the Shuttle on the grounds of cost, national security and jobs, but in the end perhaps it was simply that Nixon wasn’t prepared to preside over either the end of US manned spaceflight or, following the abandonment of Boeing’s supersonic airliner, a further retreat from the country’s world-leading position in aerospace technology. America would have a Space Shuttle because America should have one. And on January 3, 1972, NASA were told to draft a statement for the president. The Space Shuttle had been approved. Two days later, at the Western White House in California, NASA’s new administrator, James Fletcher, met with Richard Nixon.

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Next, Moser traveled to England, where he visited the British Aircraft Corporation factory at Filton, near Bristol, to be briefed on the Concorde, an aircraft he thought was perhaps the most beautiful piece of engineering he’d ever seen in his life. In contrast to Lockheed, the British and French engineers had built their supersonic airliner from aluminum-copper alloy. Because of a lower top speed, the Concorde didn’t have to contend with the same absolute temperatures as the American spy planes Moser had studied. Instead, the challenge for designers was to accommodate extreme temperature differentials of the kind that cause a cold glass to shatter on first contact with boiling water.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

Compared to a hypothetical pressurised water reactor (PWR) programme the total loss was predicted to be around £2bn in 1975 prices.44 When the electricity industry was privatised, the Magnox reactors could not be sold; the AGRs were effectively given away free. A second great project of the 1960s derived from military precedents, the Anglo-French supersonic airliner Concorde, was also, according to cost-benefit analysis, a dreadful waste of money. The prototype flew in 1969, and commercial, if that is the right term, flights started in 1976. Would there be any returns? The airlines said that they could not fly Concorde profitably even if it was given to them for nothing, as effectively happened in the cases of British Airways and Air France, who operated them for around thirty years.

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The ironer, a machine to iron clothes, diffused to 10 per cent of Canadian households, but rather than being the beginning of a new wave of household automation, promptly disappeared, much as the British tea-making machines would.16 The airship, a technological wonder of the early decades of the century, went out of use quickly from the 1930s. The miracle insecticide DDT was to disappear faster than the mosquitoes and other insects it was used to kill. Concorde looks like being the first and the last supersonic airliner. Manned hypersonic aeroplanes disappeared in the 1960s. At the end of the twentieth century, nuclear power, once the technology of the future, was set to be phased out in many countries. And in medicine too, many treatments invented in the twentieth century were discontinued, lobotomy and ECT being prominent examples, though the last is still occasionally used.

Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives
by Christopher Bartlett
Published 11 Apr 2010

At the end of its life, much of it was ‘old technology’—with production having ceased, there was no incentive to make costly improvements, even to the tires. With so few flights, it fell statistically from one of the safest aircraft to one of the most dangerous when disaster befell. [Air France Flight 4590] Concorde’s History The world’s first supersonic airliner, the Concorde 001, rolled onto the tarmac in 1967, but according to CNN it took two more years of testing and fine-tuning of the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight over France on March 2, 1969. The original plan was for a production run of 300, but in the end, the production run was limited to just 14.

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148 Reason, Professor 40, 59, 325 Red Alert 68 Regulatory Framework 330 restarting the APU 25 Risk of Flying and Driving 330 Rogers III, Captain William C. 299 Rolls-Royce 65 Rolls-Royce A380 incident 65 Rose, David 162 runway extension 99 Runway Overrun, Qantas 55 Runway Overruns xv S SabreTech 155 Safest Airline 55 Safest Seat 334 Sainte Odile 265 SAM 131 Sarin 243 Sasaki, First Officer Yutaka 115 Sato-Tomita, Jane 232 Saudi Arabian Airlines 135 Saudi King’s 747 138 Saudia Flight 163 135 Scandinavian Airlines Flight 686 & Cessna Citation CJ2 94 scenario fulfillment 91 Schornsteimer, Captain 232 Schreuder, Flight Engineer 78 Schreuder, KLM Flight Engineer 333 seat belt buckle 191 secondary radar 108 Shappell, Scott A. xiii Shootdown 297 SilkAir 89, 173 Singapore Airlines Flight 006 86 single-mindedness 140 Skiles, First Officer Jeffrey 22 Skyguide 72 Sliney, Operations Director, Ben 316 Smith, Patrick xiii Smoke in Cockpit Forced Pilots to Land Short 133 smuggling marijuana 15 Some Air Traffic Control Exchanges in French 92 Sopwith Camels 277 Sour Aftertaste 54 South African Airways Flight 201 223 South Pole 256 spy in the cockpit 247 SQ006 86 St Elmo’s fire 9 Staines 167 stall xvi States, Captain Edward 175 sterile cockpit rule 182 Stewart, Stanley 39 stick pusher 168, 184, 185 stick shake 269 stick shaker 113, 143, 168 Stockholm syndrome 312 Strong, James 63 structural flap 231 suicide 89, 122, 123, 172, 173, 324 Sullenberger III, Captain Chesley B. 19 supersonic airliner 161 swamp 155 Swiss Cheese 59, 325 Swissair 111 158 Swissair Caravelle 282 Swissair Flight 306 282 Swissair Flight SR111 158 T TACAN. 116 tail strike 121 Tailspin 297 Taipei 86 Takahama, Capt. Masami 115 Tenerife 179 Teterboro 21 THE DC-10 CASE:A Study in Applied Ethics, Technology, and Society 103 The Main Academic Models 324 threshold 15, 56, 60, 64, 65, 67, 93, 159 Ticehurst, Second Officer 170 titanium strip 163 TOGA 57, 195 Tompkins, Madeline (Mimi) 232 Trans World Airlines Flight 800 150 Transat 18 transponder 108 Trident 167 Trident tri-jet 228 TriStar 104, 135, 250, 253, 254, 285 Turkish Airlines DC-10 107 Turkish Airlines Flight 981 107 Twin-Towers 313 U U.S. airline, Delta 298 UA232 125 UA811 238 Unbuckled Passengers Hit Ceiling Panels 198 Unforeseen Consequences of Good Intentions 331 United Airlines Flight 173 27 United Airlines Flight 175 313 United Airlines Flight 232 125 United Airlines Flight 811 238 United Airlines Flight 826 252 United Airlines Flight 93 313 US Airways flight 1549 19 US$2.5 million 140 USS Montgomery 300 USS Sides 307 USS Vincennes guided missile cruiser 299 V ValueJet Flight 592 152 ValuJet situation 153 van Zanten 78 Varig Flight 820 133 Vaughan, Diane 327 vents 25, 103, 110, 123, 241, 325 Vents 105 Vidal, Gene 5 Vidal, Gore 5 Video Recorders 333 Vladivostok 297 vomiting 11 W wake turbulence 174 water-repellent 62 We are going to invert!

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

France nationalised the utilities and the carmaker Renault, in retaliation for the owner’s alleged collaboration with the Nazis. In the 1960s there was an effort in many countries to build up “national champions” in sectors such as aerospace and electronics, in a belief that this would enable Europe to close the gap with the US; in part, this motivated the creation of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde. Mergers were encouraged in the hope that large companies could benefit from economies of scale. 23 Alfred Muller-Armack coined the term “social market economy” for a structure that was a middle way between socialism and a laissez-faire economy. This structure also attempted to balance the aims of economic efficiency and income redistribution.24 Welfare programmes were a key part of this balance.

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Google’s search algorithm was funded with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation, while touchscreen technology was developed by publicly funded academics.21 Marianna Mazzucato, an economist at University College, London, argues that a myth has been created in which the state is always lumbering and bureaucratic, whereas in reality it has been vital in funding high-risk investments in areas like pharmaceuticals and technology.22 In 2013 countries in the OECD spent about $40bn on publicly funded research and development, and another $30bn on tax breaks for R&D.23 It is tough to assess the long-term record of government investment. For all the successes noted by Ms Mazzucato, there have been plenty of examples of governments backing “white elephant” projects; Concorde, the supersonic airliner, for example, or costly nuclear power stations. The private sector makes mistakes as well, of course. But once governments commit themselves to these projects, it can be very hard for politicians to admit their mistakes and cut their losses. But it is pretty clear that there is a public interest in funding long-term research.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

If the United States and other countries decided to prioritize sending humans to Mars to the same degree as the Apollo program, few would disagree that astronauts could reach Mars well before 2050, and probably by 2040. However, the prevailing political and commercial reality creates a large gulf between what can be done and what will be done. Consider that the Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, which entered service four months before the first Apollo landing on the moon, made its final flight almost twenty years ago, with no detailed plans for any successor. NASA’S JUSTIFICATION FOR HUMAN SPACE EXPLORATION Those who turn to the NASA website “Beyond Earth: Expanding Human Presence into the Solar System” will find that the section “Why We Explore” includes the assertion that “curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and the generations of tomorrow to join NASA on this exciting journey.”

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

It will call itself by different names, it will appear differently from one context to another, and it will almost always wear the appealing masks of safety or convenience. And as we've seen, the relevant choices will be made by a relatively large number of people each responding to their own local need—"large," anyway, as compared to the compact decision nexus involved in the production of a fission plant or a supersonic airliner. Who, then, will get to determine the shape of the ubiquitous computing we experience? Designers, obviously—by which I mean the entire apparatus of information-technology production, from initial conceptual framing straight through to marketing. Regulators, too, will play a part; given everyware's clear potential to erode privacy, condition public space, and otherwise impinge on the exercise of civil liberties, there is a legitimate role for state actors here.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Motion sickness is a conflict between our eyes and our sense of balance.4 In extreme cases, it can even be the result of an unconscious assumption that we have been poisoned.5 People with long car commutes are more likely than others to have high blood pressure, to suffer from fatigue and to have difficulty in focusing their attention – they are even prone to excessive anger.6 In hindsight, the supersonic airliner Concorde was an engineering marvel that was incompatible with humans. It produced a deafening boom that prohibited it from overland travel, and the time zone changes across the Atlantic meant it flew too fast for the circadian rhythms of its passengers to adjust. It was the most extreme example of an inherently biological limitation: jet lag.

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers
by Rennay Dorasamy
Published 2 Dec 2021

There are a number of other factors to consider such as the number of passengers it can carry, the fuel consumed, the range or distance the aircraft can cover, and the maintenance and lifespan. These factors determine the financial viability of the aircraft. A real-world example of this scenario is the retirement of the supersonic airliner, the Concorde, which is an engineering marvel but unfortunately, not the most economical. In much the same way, the technical delivery team has a responsibility for the commercial trajectory and financial viability that influences the lifespan of an API Marketplace. In all honesty, I would classify this very much as a privilege and challenges the Engineering team to maintain a view on commercial objectives when designing and building solutions.

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am
by Robert Gandt
Published 1 Mar 1995

The technology, it was assumed, would evolve from the experimental B-70 supersonic bomber being built by the military aircraft manufacturer North American. At Lockheed’s famous “Skunk works,” where futuristic airplanes like the P-38 and the U-2 and the F-104 had been created, preliminary sketches were already rendered for a supersonic airliner. But Quesada’s proposal drowned in the muddy waters of the Defense Department and the Eisenhower cabinet. Then came young blood. The Kennedy administration replaced Quesada with a former test pilot named Najeeb Halaby. In addition to heading the Federal Aviation Agency, Halaby would be aviation adviser to Kennedy.

Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle

This effort would see two smaller, more streamlined orbiter/lander combinations launched on two cheaper Titan rockets for a landing in 1976.6 It should be said that a number of Viking managers later said that the advance work done for the Voyager Mars program helped them to design the later Viking mission to Mars, so perhaps not all the money spent over the seven-year life of Voyager Mars was wasted after all. Oh, and the cost of the Viking program? Also about a billion dollars. But at least it worked, and brilliantly. Nineteen seventy-six was a good year. The world's first supersonic airliner, the Anglo-French Concorde, was finally flying; Nadia Comaneci would earn the first perfect score in Olympic gymnastics; and punk was just emerging onto the music scene (whether or not that was good news depended on whom you asked, of course). In space news, NASA had officially unveiled its plans for the new space shuttle.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
by Tim Butcher
Published 2 Jul 2007

Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies. There was a certain brilliance to Mobutu's evil. He was the consummate showman, luring George Foreman and Muhammad Ali to his capital, Kinshasa, for the most famous bout in boxing history, the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle'. Concorde, the world's only supersonic airliner, would be chartered specially to fly supplies of pink champagne from Paris to his jungle palace complex at Gbadolite in the north of the country. The runway was specially extended so that the jet could land. Symbolically, Mobutu was the first leader of the Congo to tame the mighty river, building the only bridge to span the Congo River, the Marshal Mobutu suspension bridge.

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

People who do well on exams in school are not necessarily those who do well at work. Students are rewarded for following the train of thought set in textbooks. If they think for themselves or question textbook knowledge, examiners can’t give them the marks their original minds may well deserve. I love the story of Concorde engineers, at the early design stage of the supersonic airliner, making paper planes and throwing them around in their drawing offices to test ideas for an ideal wing. Some of these models are in the safekeeping of the Science Museum in South Kensington, a happy reminder of how things teachers and examiners might well disapprove of might just lead some young people toward some of the greatest designs of all time.

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London
by David Wragg
Published 14 Apr 2010

Modernisation The 1955 Modernisation Plan was the most ambitious programme ever prepared for Britain’s railways. The initial plan called for investment of £1,240 million (around £14,880 million today) but this was later increased to £1,500 million, which was, ignoring inflation, three times the cost to the British taxpayer of the Concorde supersonic airliner project in the early 1970s, and rather more if the inflation-prone 1950s, 60s and 70s were included. The plan was the scheme that should have been introduced immediately following nationalisation, and was the brainchild of a Conservative government. It was meant to dispense with the Victorian and Edwardian railway, of which so much was still in evidence, and create a truly modern railway.

Frommer's Seattle 2010
by Karl Samson
Published 10 Mar 2010

You’ll also see one of the famous Blackbird spy planes, which at one time were the world’s fastest jets (you can even sit in the cockpit of one of these babies). There’s also a rare World War II Corsair fighter that was rescued from Lake Washington and restored to its original glory. Visitors also get to board a retired British Airways Concorde supersonic airliner. An exhibit on the U.S. space program features an Apollo command module. Of course, you’ll also see plenty of Boeing planes, including a reproduction of Boeing’s first plane, which was built in 1916. The museum also incorporates part of Boeing’s old wooden factory building, a remnant from the company’s earliest years.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

Although the real causes of relative economic decline had more prosaic origins in a long-term failure to invest and reform management, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party also caught the virus. It promised to transform a creaking Britain through the ‘white heat of technology’. The subsequent experiments with hovercraft, air-cooled nuclear power stations and the Anglo-French supersonic airliner Concorde all cost taxpayers a fortune while receiving precisely zero export orders, even as national prestige received another blow with the devaluation of the pound in 1967 and trade union strikes challenged the wage policies that had been used to control inflation. Wallis ended up with Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, as embittered guest speakers at meetings of the racist Conservative Party faction known as the Monday Club where they could moan on against immigrants, unions and socialist governments.103 But it was Powell who wove together all these feelings into a new, radically right-wing economic programme.

Frommer's Washington State
by Karl Samson
Published 2 Nov 2010

You’ll also see one of the famous Blackbird spy planes, which at one time were the world’s fastest jets (you can even sit in the cockpit of one of these babies). There’s also a rare World War II Corsair fighter that was rescued from Lake Washington and restored to its original glory. Visitors also get to board a retired British Airways Concorde supersonic airliner. An exhibit on the U.S. space program features an Apollo command module. Of course, you’ll also see plenty of Boeing planes, including a reproduction of Boeing’s first plane, which was built in 1916. The museum also incorporates part of Boeing’s old wooden factory building, a remnant from the company’s earliest years. 9404 E.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

The Prime Minister said that he felt there was no objection to countries co-operating to make these armaments, if they could then be bought outright … He felt that this was essential to avoid a position of dependence on the United States in this respect … this independence was essential, if it was ever to be possible to make the United Europe which was his dream. He was very glad that some co-operation had been possible between Britain and France in regard to the supersonic airliner [Concorde]. President de Gaulle said that there was co-operation, not only in the supersonic civil transport, but also in the space rocket programme. France had never refused to make joint arrangements with Britain in these respects.21 All very courteous, amicable and non-binding, but it was not deal-making conversation.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Glaeser, E. L. 2011. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin. Glaeser, E. L., et al. 1992. Growth in cities. Journal of Political Economy 100:1126–1152. Glancey, J. 2016. Concorde: The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner. London: Atlantic Books. Glazier, D. S. 2006. The 3/4-power law is not universal: Evolution of isometric, ontogenetic metabolic scaling in pelagic animals. BioScience 56:325–332. Glazier, D. S. 2010. A unifying explanation for diverse metabolic scaling in animals and plants. Biological Reviews 85:111–138.

A History of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 2 Jul 2009

Even then the pound, still a world ‘reserve’ currency, would be under constant pressure. This was bad enough. Labour had been elected promising a more generous welfare system, better pensions, spending on schools and much more. That was immediately in jeopardy. Prized national projects including the supersonic airliner project jointly developed with the French, Concorde, were under threat of being axed. The Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, regarded by Labour ministers as a Tory reactionary, was quickly insisting that the deflationary squeeze must be tighter still and that other pet Labour projects such as the renationalization of steel must be dropped.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were
by Dominic Sandbrook
Published 29 Sep 2010

Another acerbic observer, Private Eye’s Auberon Waugh, told Time magazine that Britain had become ‘something between Nkrumah’s Ghana and Anthony Hope’s Ruritania’. ‘Many of us here are more or less permanently on strike,’ Waugh explained. ‘We are all paid far too much and expect to be paid much more. It is true that the public services in London are breaking down even while Mr Heath pursues his grandiose schemes to build supersonic airliners and dig railway tunnels under the Channel to France. It is true that electricity supplies are more or less permanently threatened by industrial action, and urban violence is just beginning.’ And yet it seemed that most people were far more interested in ‘the spectacle of two totally absurd young people being driven around London in a glass coach’.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

STEVEN F UDVAR-HAZY CENTER The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center ( 703-572-4118; 10am-5:30pm), located in Chantilly near Dulles airport, is a huge hangar filled with surplus planes and spacecraft that wouldn’t fit at the museum’s DC location. Highlights include the space shuttle Enterprise, the B-29 Enola Gay, SR-71 Blackbird and a Concorde supersonic airliner. While the museum is free, parking costs $15. ARLINGTON Just across the Potomac River from DC, Arlington County was once part of Washington until it was returned to Virginia in 1847. In recent years the gentrified neighborhoods of Arlington have spawned some tempting dining and nightlife options.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

Though still a work in progress, the museum is already the largest construction project in Smithsonian history, big enough to allow display of some of its biggest birds in open hangarlike settings. The main Aviation Hangar, ten stories high and three football fields long, houses more than 100 aircraft, some on its main floor, others suspended from two hanging levels beside elevated overlooks. Highlights include a Concorde supersonic airliner; the Enola Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; and the only surviving Boeing 307 Stratoliner. There’s also a collection of 45 aircraft engines and more than 1,500 smaller artifacts such as uniforms, models, aerial cameras, and displays on famous aviators, including Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

STEVEN F UDVAR-HAZY CENTER The Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center ( 703-572-4118; 10am-5:30pm) , located in Chantilly near Dulles airport, is a huge hangar filled with surplus planes and spacecraft that wouldn’t fit at the museum’s DC location. Highlights include the space shuttle Enterprise, the B-29 Enola Gay, SR-71 Blackbird and a Concorde supersonic airliner. While the museum is free, parking costs $15. ARLINGTON Just across the Potomac River from DC, Arlington County was once part of Washington until it was returned to Virginia in 1847. In recent years the gentrified neighborhoods of Arlington have spawned some tempting dining and nightlife options.