Yesterday I had a meeting with the architects at my customer, and had a good discussion on WPF/E vs their proprietary cross platform dev environment (so I guess it was a discussion on OUR proprietary cross platform dev environment against THEIR proprietary cross platform dev environment).  Anyway, that was tons of fun.

We finished about 12:30, and I had a 5:00 flight out of Dulles.  To kill time, I went to the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center.  It was free, although "parking" in a nearly empty parking lot was $12.00.  It is amazing what they have there.  I have been to the NASM in downtown Washington, but this is the first time I have gotten to the new place.  It was nice to be there on a Friday afternoon, because it was pretty much empty, and I could wander anywhere I wanted, without waiting for anything.  There were a couple of female Air Force officers walking around, and I was struck at how young they were to be Captains.  I guess I am getting old when people who are one rank higher than I was when I got out of the Army look like teenagers.

Anyway, references to my mortality aside, the center had lots of historical gems.  One of the coolest things was the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII.  They also have the first space shuttle, the Enterprise on display.  When you see a shuttle launch, its easy to forget how big the shuttle is, and how amazing it is that something that big can be thrown into orbit in less than 10 minutes.  It's funny that they were originally going to call the first space shuttle the "Constitution", but the outcry from all of the star-trek geeks in the world led them to change their mind and call it the "Enterprise".

There were lots of other more esoteric planes on display, from weird Japanese night fighters to weird American night fighters to weird German night fighters.   They have a Concorde, a MIG-15 and an F-86 Saber, a Hawker Hurricane and an FW-190.  They even have the trailer that the Apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined in after the moon landing.  One of the neatest things they have is an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest reconnaissance plane that the US Air Force has ever had.

The thing I like about the Udvar Hazy center as opposed to the downtown museum is that there is more space for full sized airplanes, and while the downtown place has alot of the "big names" (i.e. the wright flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 capsule, etc), the Udvar Hazy center has some stranger, interesting stuff.

I only had my phone with me, so the pictures aren't the best.  Next time, I will take my real camera.  I was only there for an hour or so, and I will have to go back to spend some more time taking everything in.