Seattle Museum of Flight

The Museum of Flight has been in business in one form or another since 1968. It was originally set in the Seattle Center World's Fair building, and it moved to its current Boeing Field location in 1983.

The move came with two new buildings. The Red Barn—an all-wooden 1909 building that served as the original Boeing factory—was acquired from the city in 1975, and The Great Gallery opened in 1983.

The Red Barn houses life-size manufacturing models on the first floor and chronicles airplane construction and the Boeing family on the second. The Great Gallery is the main area of the museum. It hosts the original plane collection, including the SR-71 Blackbird (the world’s fastest military plane) and a human powered Gossamer Albatross. Free tours run every half hour until 3:30 p.m. and cover the unique features of the collection. A longer version extensively explores the Red Barn.

All tours are run by the volunteer staff of docents, many of which are former pilots, mechanics, or aviation engineers. The museum provides little else in the way of guidance and is truly set up for visitors to simply meander around and take in whatever they see fit. This structure is well suited for dads (the museum’s highest attendance day is Father's Day) and for other aviation nuts.

The museum had unfortunately drifted out of cultural relevance during the ‘90s, but it has regained tourists’ interest in the last five years with major expansions and revisions. Composed of several separate spaces, the museum has been revitalized by embracing the idea of interactivity with a plethora of new exhibits.

What's New
The J. Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing, opened in 2004, explores both World Wars through human interest stories. The Champlin Fighter Collection, consisting of almost thirty fiercely painted planes, is used as a backdrop to explore both the sacrifices of war and the opportunities it can provide to minorities, such as women gaining respect through their roles as factory workers. The collection also explores the transgressions that war can breed out of fear, for instance, Japanese internment camps.

The Rendezvous in Space exhibit was added in 2007. It covers all things celestial through interactive exhibits, from the physics of rockets to what astronauts eat. One can walk through a reproduction of the Destiny Space Station Laboratory, which showcases how astronauts sleep and also has a portal window looking down on an electronic earth.

The museum recently added a memorial pedestrian bridge that connects the main museum with one of its most popular features: tours of the first Air Force One and the only Concorde on the West Coast. Before it was permanently grounded in 2003, the Concorde flew twice the speed of sound, which means when it arrived in New York from London, it landed before it departed according to local time. In addition to permanent attractions, the museums hosts a slew of rotating exhibits, and are currently featuring Harmony of the Universe: The Art of Toshiro Sawanuki; a thirty piece collection of Sawanuki’s rendering of brightly colored cosmic landscapes. This spring will feature public submitted photographs, brought together under the theme, “Spirit of Flight.”