Seattle Museum of Flight

If you haven't figured it out by now, I am a huge aviation buff. I love planes. Seattle is home to one of the largest airplane companies in the world and when I heard there was a Museum of Flight there, I had to go check it out.

The Museum is a bit out of town and is pretty close to the airport. It is also nestled between a couple Boeing factories. Anyways....

Part of the Museum is the original Boeing factory restored. This is one of the early Boeing planes in the process of being built. This part of the museum was also pretty neat because it had some of the tools they used to build the planes.

These are some wing sections before they are put together on the plane. There was also a fixture so that the wings would be right.

This is an early prototype model of the B-52. Originally it was going to have a bubble canopy and the pilot and copilot would almost sit like a fighter. That was changed to the current configuration.

This is the front of the restored factory. It was called the red barn for some strange reason.

This is one of the versions of Air Force One which is a specialized 707. The color scheme came from Jackie Kennedy who thought that the plane could use some spicing up.

The Museum also had a Concorde and this was the cockpit.

This was the first 747 flown.

This is the cockpit of Air Force One. The rest of the plane was pretty neat, it had a specialized communications setup so the President could stay in contact with his staff.

This is the nose art of a P-40 Warhawk.

This is the Concorde I mentioned above.

This is a P-51 Mustang, one of the better fighters of World War II.

This is a Spitfire.

The museum had a pretty extensive World War I collection but unfortunately, that's not my balliwick, so I'm not sure what many of the planes are.



One of my favorite shots of old planes.

This is a Mercury capsule.



One of the things I really liked about this museum is that they had a well lit SR-71. Most Museums have it in a dark corner and I can never get a nice shot of it.

This is an F-4 Phantom.

MiG-21

And of course, my favorite plane, the F-14 Tomcat.

Overall I was pretty impressed with the museum. It was nicely laid out and I learned quite a bit about Boeing (the man) that I didn't know before. It had a fair number of planes and many of them were pretty well lit. It also had a mockup of a control tower that you could go in.