At the Air and Space Museum, I saw the Spirit of St.Louis. The Spirit of St. Louis is a Ryan NYP. It isn’t a very big plane and when Mom saw it she was surprised it was so small. Its landing gear was weird. It had two wheels in the front and then a stick in the back! No wheels; just a stick like the kick-stand of a bike!
That was in the front part, called the Milestones
of Flight gallery. Also there, they had SpaceShip
One, the first privately launched spacecraft, an
X-15, the first aircraft to fly Mach 3, Mach 4, and
Mach 5, a Wright EX which flew across the
country, and some spacecraft. Then we
headed to the space section. We saw Skylab
and it is really small! They had the Apollo 11
Command Module, a Soyuz capsule, a V-2,
and a lot of other rockets. Then Violet
wanted to go to the How Things Fly exhibit. A lot of the stuff there is hands-on, and I got to go in the cockpit of a Cessna 150.
Also, wesaw a U-2, which is a big
spyplane. The U-2 was in the
Looking At Earth part, with lots
of views from different altitude,
ranging from 10 foot hill to
25,000,000 miles away in a
satellite. Then, we headed over
to where the airliners were. Mom thought the DC-3 was really pretty, and we got a great picture of it. There was also the front section of a DC-7, which is an old propeller airliner.
It was really nice on the inside. I wish that when you
flew nowadays that you got to fly like that. After the
America by Air section (where the airliners were), I flew
a flight simulator. I was in an F-4 and we had to shoot
down the enemy planes. When I was yawing right, Dad
bumped the stick and we banked inverted. I was
pushing the stick hard right then! We only got one
fighter shot down, though. Then we went to the National Portrait Museum. There were really cool pictures of all the presidents. They also had some cool sculptures. Check in tomorrow, I’ll have another post! - Hayden