Seattle’s Museum of Flight

Susie and I were up in Seattle earlier in the year for a wedding and while we were there, we visited the Museum of Flight.  It’s one of the world’s great museums, and the $25 admission fee was money well spent.  We were lucky on our visit: It was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and the museum had a special exhibit focused on that.  It was awesome.

Neil Armstrong’s actual Apollo 11 capsule. The actual capsule. It was like touching history.
One of the Saturn rocket engines used on the Apollo mission.
My photo of a photo: Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. I came close to meeting him once at Nieuport 17, a restaurant in Tustin, California, but he wasn’t there the night we were.
An Omega Speedmaster watch worn on the moon.  One of these original moon watches sold for $1.6 million just a few years ago.  There’s an interesting story on this Omega watch (and on a competitor watch, the Bulova). My apologies for the flaky photo; this was the best I could in the dim lighting.

The Apollo special exhibit was only a fraction of what the Museum of Flight displayed.  The main hall had all kinds of aircraft.

A view of the Museum of Flight’s main hall. That’s an SR-71 at the center of the photo. It’s a spy aircraft developed in the 1960s that flew entire missions over Russia and China, all at supersonic speeds.
An early commercial passenger aircraft.
An F4 Phantom. I was an engineer on the F-16, the air combat fighter that replaced the F4.  When I was in the Army, we provided air defense for an airbase in Korea with an F4 wing, and watching these aircraft take off with their afterburners on was fun.
A World War II airplane on display in the Museum of Flight’s Personal Courage Wing. The Personal Courage Wing, a separate part of the Museum, has 28 aircraft from World War I and World War II.

We spent nearly a full day at the Museum of Flight, and we could have spent more time there.   We visited the Apollo display, the Main Hall, the Personal Courage Wing, and the Red Barn (the original Boeing airplane factory).   As were left the airport, we saw an enclosed pedestrian walkway over the road, and it led to an area with several aircraft parked on the other side of the road.   We could have spent another day there.  We’ll save that for our next visit to Seattle.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight is a 20-minute ride out of downtown Seattle, and it’s a great way to spend a day.

6 thoughts on “Seattle’s Museum of Flight”

  1. I was there when I was crewing the B-17. Fantastic place and they had the most extensive collection of Flying Tigers (AVG) stuff I have ever seen. What a place. Great gift shop and cafe too. Totally agree with you on this one.

  2. Wow, thanks for posting this. We are headed to Seattle for an American Culinary Federation convention in March. This looks like a great place to visit while Melody is doing her chef thing all day.

  3. Hey Joe, As I was in Seattle frequently on business I tried to stop by this museum on my way to SEATAC whenever I could. Fantastic museum work a lot of good stories inside. This one and the one at Wright Paterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio are my favorite aircraft museums in America.

  4. Looks like a great museum. Another is the U.S.Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I visited it last summer.
    PS: The SR-71 flew at Mach 3+

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