The Blue Angels Hornet jet destined for display at the Museum of Flight makes a stopover in Rock Springs, Wyo., over the weekend. (Credit: Museum of Flight)
A Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet is closing in on its new home at Seattle’s Museum of Flight – without flying a single mile.
Instead, the partially disassembled jet has been riding on top of a flatbed truck during a weeklong road trip that started in Pensacola, Fla., where the Blue Angels aerobatics team has its home base.
“The going has been a little slow through the South due to the tragic flooding in Louisiana, not to mention rains along the way,” museum spokesman Ted Huetter told GeekWire in an email.
The truck passed through Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon over the weekend, and it’s expected to spend tonight in Ellensburg, Wash.
The U.S. Navy Blue Angels perform at Seafair 2015 in Seattle. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)
A 30-year-old Navy F/A-18 Hornet jet that’s been through combat duty as well as a dozen years with the Blue Angels is being packed up in Florida for ground delivery to Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
Museum spokesman Ted Huetter told GeekWire that the partially disassembled airplane will travel from the Blue Angels’ home base at Pensacola Naval Air Station by truck. “It is going to be making its way across the country this week,” he said today.
Arrival is expected sometime in the Aug. 21-23 time frame. Huetter said the museum is planning to provide updates on the shipment’s progress via socialmedia.
“I am 90 percent sure it’s going to happen,” Erika Callahan, the museum’s vice president for marketing and communications, told GeekWire. “I’m just keeping it real.”
The Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight houses a full-fuselage shuttle trainer that was once used to train astronauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. (Credit: Museum of Flight)
For almost 30 years, the International Space University has prepared fans of the final frontier for executive jobs at places like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. This October, for the first time, ISU is bringing its weeklong Executive Space Course to Seattle.
The course is designed to give professionals in fields such as marketing, law and business management a quick grounding in the realities of the space business, touching upon science and technology as well as regulation and policy. It’s a condensed version of the graduate-level programs that ISU offers at its main campus in Strasbourg, France.
The Seattle program is due to run from Oct. 3 to 7 at the Museum of Flight, during World Space Week. The course will be taught by ISU faculty and guest lecturers, with an assist from Seattle-area universities and aerospace businesses.
Today’s announcement was timed to coincide with the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2016 conference in Seattle this week.
Letu Yang helps his 4-year-old son, Rafael Yang, fly a jet through a “Full Throttle” simulation at the “Above and Beyond” exhibit at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
Most of the floor space at Seattle’s Museum of Flight is set aside to celebrate past glories of aerospace – but “Above and Beyond,” a traveling exhibition that opens this weekend, is different: It’s all about what lies ahead.
During a Thursday preview, schoolkids thronged to watch a wraparound video about the future of flight, play big-screen video games, get their selfies taken on a virtual Mars and check out exhibits about drones, 3-D printing and next-generation spacecraft.
The Boeing Co. is presenting the interactive exhibition as part of this year’s centennial celebration, but “Above and Beyond” goes far beyond the story of the company’s first 100 years.
“It doesn’t just concentrate on what Boeing has done. It concentrates on the future,” Doug King, the Museum of Flight’s president and CEO, said as he watched teens and tweens swarm past. “And these are the people who are going to create that future.”
The exhibition has already been at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That means the producers at Texas-based Evergreen Exhibitions already have a pretty good idea which attractions will be the most popular. Here are the top five, as listed by Mike Kempf, Evergreen Exhibitions’ vice president of marketing:
Fire trucks greet the Boeing 727 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
The final flight of the first Boeing 727 prototype jet ever produced was one of the shortest trips it’s made in its 53-year history: a 15-minute jaunt from a restoration hangar at Everett’s Paine Field to Seattle’s Boeing Field and the Museum of Flight.
But in another sense, it took decades to make the journey.
The three-engine jet was used as a test prototype when Boeing started flying the 727s in 1963, and was delivered to United Airlines in 1964. The plane put in nearly 65,000 hours of service with United, and made more than 48,000 takeoffs and landings.
The three-engine jet made its last commercial voyage in 1991, and then United donated it to the Museum of Flight. At the time, the museum couldn’t accommodate the plane in Seattle, so it was put into storage in Everett. Some of its parts were scavenged for other planes.
For 25 years, a volunteer team toiled to raise money, acquire spare parts (mostly donated by FedEx) and refurbish the plane for one more flight. Once the plane was judged airworthy, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a special permit to clear the way for the March 2 flight under visual flight rules.
Boeing historian Mike Lombardi holds memorabilia from the company’s history. (Credit: Boeing)
Think of it as “Antiques Roadshow” for the aerospace set: The Boeing Co. is looking for historical artifacts and memorabilia that will help the company tell the story of its first 100 years in the Puget Sound region.
Your item could go on display at a centennial exhibit due to open at Seattle’s Museum of Flight in May.
“Check your attics, check your basement, check your trophy cases,” Mike Lombardi, Boeing’s corporate historian and archivist, said in a video about the effort. “Find all that Boeing memorabilia, those models, those photographs.”
The company is particularly interested in subjects such as the company’s role in the local community during World War II, the first flights and rollouts of Boeing airplanes, Seafair activities and the 1962 World’s Fair.
Billionare Jeff Bezos beams as Allison Loveland, a collection specialist at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, unwraps an Apollo F1 rocket engine injection plate. Geoff Nunn, the museum’s adjunct curator for space history, stands by to the left. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
Even Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos got misty-eyed at Seattle’s Museum of Flight during Thursday’s unveiling of rocket engine parts from the Apollo moonshots.
“I always do,” he told GeekWire afterward.
It’s not just the fact that Bezos has been a space fan since the age of 5. He funded the Bezos Expeditions voyage that recovered hundreds of parts from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 14,000 feet down – and he was aboard the ship when the mangled 40-year-old parts were brought up from the deep in 2013.
It was Bezos who asked NASA to let some of the artifacts go on exhibit in his hometown museum. This summer, the space agency gave its OK. So Bezos was all smiles when he showed off some of the shrink-wrapped remains from the Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 to the moon.
Matt Damon stars as a stranded astronaut in “The Martian.” (Credit: Twentieth Century Fox)
“The Martian” isn’t due to hit theaters until Oct. 2, but the highly anticipated man-vs.-Mars movie is already sparking some scientific nitpicking. So here’s some advice from NASA astronaut Michael Barratt: Don’t get hung up on what the filmmakers got wrong.
“I would just ask everybody to get past that, because there are so many things they got right,” Barratt, a flight surgeon and two-time spaceflier who has been compared to Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy, said during a panel at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
