A trip back in time

I received an email this week from the Museum of Flight at Boeing (to which we're members) that they were hosting an Engineering Fair and I thought it might be good for the kids to see so despite Stevie being on call, I packed up the three of them and drove up to Seattle.  The Fair was interesting, and they all learned about different kinds of engineering, and then we hit the exhibits. 

This is one of the many flight museums around the country that was competing for getting one of the Space Shuttles when they were retired, but they lost their bid to other places.  However, they did manage to score the Shuttle flight simulator (the actual one the astronauts trained in) and have this set up in a new exhibit hall.  Despite having been to the museum a couple of time, we have yet to see this simulator so that's where we headed today.  It's pretty amazing to get so close to modern history.  We weren't able to go into the cockpit (you needed to schedule a tour for that), but we did stand in the cargo bay.  It's actually a lot smaller than I thought it would be.

No, this wasn't the simulator!

So after exploring modern history, we went outside the building to some planes you could tour.  The two that were open this day were the Concord and the first jet Air Force One.

The Air Force One they had was the first jet, a 707, and was used by Kennedy through the first Bush. George Bush got the first 747 in 1990. So this was the plane that Johnson was sworn into office aboard. It was kind of a step back in time to see the antiquated technology. Of course it was "high tech" back then!

They didn't know what this was!

The Concord was fun to go aboard too, but I quickly discovered taht I would not have appreciated paying a bunch of money to fly on it.  It is VERY narrow and squishy.  Made me closterphobic just to walk through it!