Behind The Scenes Air and Space Museum (1984)

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello I'm Jim Burnett it is may 1984 and Tim Wooldridge is guest speaker for this show the tenth in our series on NASA and Aeronautics Wooldridge is chairman of Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC here in this program taped at NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland Ohio Woolridge uses a fine display of visuals in describing the various functions of the Air and Space Museum I believe you will find the presentation enjoyable Wooldridge is prominent and knowledgeable and articulate in the field of aeronautics we're going to talk about the National Air and Space Museum but let me start out before I show you some slides let me give you some numbers because it would be a natural reaction to say if you have not been to Washington well what's so good about the National Air and Space Museum and who needs it what's it all about 75 million people have thought that was pretty good last Wednesday we had our 75 million visitor in eight years simple math puts you somewhere up around 10 million this year we at the rate we're going we'll have over 12 million people in the museum this year it's incredible when the museum was built they anticipated about 3 million a year they had over 10 the first year so if we could turn down the lights just a little bit and turn on the side projector this is what it used to look like many of you who grew up around Washington or visited there way back in the 30s and 40s probably remember this old tin shed this was the original national air museum on Independence Avenue and that's where most of the the artifacts were on display they did have the spirit of st. Louis and the Wright Flyer and some of the large aircraft over in the arts and industries building which by the way still exists used for other functions this is dates from pre-world War One and actually has a kind of a NASA related history to it Jerry Hunsaker a very famous aeronautical engineer in his day did a lot of his work here as was a lot of the pre NASA days research done in that building that's what it was like for years and this is what the present National Air and Space Museum looked like in 1972 and take my word for it as mr. stofan can attribute to there is nothing more valuable in Washington than a parking lot and it was not a simple matter to say oh that looks like a good place to put a museum let's take it over no way so in 1972 after all the bureaucratic wrangling was done this parking lot began to transformation to the Air and Space Museum it took four years from the beginning to end to construct it dig the hole build the building get the artifacts moved in this is just a shot of it along the way that's what it looks like now and it has not changed the external appearance has not changed at all since since the day it opened it was completed July 1st 1976 and it has another thing in common with Louis it was pointed out to me this morning that your zero-g out there was bought in under budget and ahead of schedule so was that they turned money back in from the budget to build this Air and Space Museum and it was completed wall ahead of schedule I want to show you some of the the items that were moved in to the building they started about four months ahead of time and these artifacts came from all over the country and what you're looking at right here the Skylab and it came from Huntsville and I haven't checked my my waterways of America book lately but I understand it somehow found its way over to the Mississippi down the Mississippi and came up the inland waterway by barge in three pieces and that's what you see here this was the largest artifact to move into the museum it came in three sections as I said here is a picture I think and we had a little debate over this last week on just what we're really looking at but the consensus of opinion with a space expert seem to think that that was part of the apollo-soyuz craft that was moved into the West End this is the Douglass wall cruiser and I should add that it doesn't have any wings on it this was one of the first of four aircraft that started around the world trip on April 6th September 28th in 1924 started from Seattle and three of them finished it and this was the first airplane we moved into the building here is the spirit of st. Louis being hoisted to the overhead let me tell you about some of the people who are involved in doing this fantastic you have professional riggers of course in their Union people a lot of rough tough burly types who are very proud of their profession but it was fantastic to see the artist come out in these people they would hang the spirit of st. Louis and this guy they called the Greek and I remember and would stand out there was a real burly fella never done anything like this in his life is that I think you better lower the wing tip about three degrees you know and make it look like it's really fine the interesting part about it was it was a tremendous cooperative effort yeah Union people non-union people you had the curators rolling up their shirtsleeves and getting out there and actually doing manual labor when it began to look like we wouldn't get everything moved in in time you had volunteers docents it was a wonderful effort this is a picture of the Douglass royal cruiser as it was being hoisted to the ceiling where it's on display one of the interesting things about many of the older airplanes that you see in the museum is that the pilots are still alive and as the years go by I get fewer and fewer obviously but I was mentioning at lunch that leeway generally wait who was the pilot of one of the world cruisers is alive and well in fact was in the museum last week Jimmy Doolittle was in the museum last month so these old timers keep coming back and it's a wonderful experience to be able to to sit down and pick their brain now I would like to be able to say that in four months of moving things into the into the museum nothing happened I'm about to show you the one thing that happened we were hosting the the dc-3 they obviously attached the wings before this next picture that I'm about to show you and they got about three feet off the deck and all of a sudden there was this horrendous snap and a fitting broke on one of the the steel girders overhead which was holding a cable which was holding the airplane and the fitting started sliding across the cable released the tension on the wing the dc-3 fell down and really bent up the wingtip and it was replaced within three days they they found a new wing tip down Robins Air Force Base down south from ac-47 and it was flown up and put in and business as usual you talk a lot of a lot of guilty-looking people standing around and try walking away it didn't happen on my watch this is the jupiter-c I believe going into position very basic decision have to be made when they're before they they put a shell under the ground do we build the building around the missiles or do you make the building and then put the missiles inside later and that was the decision that was made and some of these the the big ones that went in there actually there's four inches clearance between the top of the largest missile and the ceiling so they called it pretty closely but correct opening ceremony it's there's Michael Collins on the right side they're of course very famous astronaut and at that time director of the National Air and Space Museum President Ford and the vice president and the chief justice was there also and very seldom at any given occasion you could find all three of those people present the this fancy-looking gadget should appeal to most of you here because it was designed to cut the ribbon to formally open the museum on July the 1st but the similar that was going to trigger this fancy little device was coming from the Viking enroute ours and it in truth work they got a signal from Viking and it cut the ribbon and I've known the most people there we had a little green Martian standing around the corner with a with a little beeper to set that thing off if that there any time if it didn't happen but it did work fine and by the way the Viking is now part of the collection you probably read about in the paper last week that we have formally accepted custody of the Viking Lander now sitting on Mars so it's part of the National Air and Space Museum visitors a year we're gonna get that and that's a picture of it cutting the ribbon at work right and this is that the main gallery immediately after the opening ceremony we had open to the public it's called milestones of flight for very obvious reasons when you just look at it you will see more famous vehicles sitting in there than any one place you can think of I think one of the more interesting things and here the width of that gallery is 120 feet and on the left side of your your picture there you can see the original Wright Flyer and that was the distance of its original flight but yet not more than 20 feet from the Wright Flyer there's the Apollo 11 which won a Court of 66 years later when a quarter of a million miles the course obviously I don't have to talk to you about technology but the interesting thing is all these this beautiful equipment and examples of our modern technology yesterday well the last things I did before I left was that one of the curators go down and we had the same weather this week that you did and count the leaks and add them up we have a leaky roof in that building and for eight years we haven't been unable to stop it so there's water coming through on the Wright Flyer and the spirit of st. Louis there is the grand old man I understand he was here not too long ago within the last year or two Paul Garber he is the historian emeritus and one of the most humbling experiences of my life was to try to give a speech directly after he gave one he's been here 60 years has met ever and knows personally every famous aviator who ever lived by on a first-name basis and one of the first talks I ever gave at the museum at seven or eight years ago I got on Naval Aviation and I had to follow Paul and when you stand in front of a bunch of people and talk about Slim Lindbergh and Orville and Wilbur and so on so forth and then you go in there you're giving your first speech you know he's a great man he's about 84 85 now and just soldiering along and he spends most of his time giving lectures and and answering his correspondence which is considerable he is the person who sent the telegram to Lindbergh and said that we want your airplane wonderful person the Wright Flyer we have talked about briefly you can see the Spirit is single in the upper left the x1 up there in the upper right the first aircraft to to break the sound barrier faster than the speed of sound as we just got through repainting that airplane Chuck Yeager keeps coming back every year and by the way he is our absolutely the most popular speaker of anybody we get during our lecture series he packs a house and he's been complaining for eight years that airplane has painted the wrong color he's right the day that he flew it to the speed record to break the speed of sound in 1947 it was all orange so the airplane is now and properly painted it's completely orange the moon rock people are wonderful and they also present company excluded I'm sure we'll walk away with anything that isn't nailed down and we actually we actually caught somebody hammer and chisel trying to take that moon rock out of the thing I that's embedded into not that little fella he didn't do it but it's great you can watch we walk up there and you can rub the moon rock I'll tell you some more stories later on here about people this is the air transportation gallery pretty recent photograph the as you can tell by the Federal Express airplane sitting there that is so Falcons yet this was offered to us and when a multi-millionaire calls him on the phone his name is Fred Smith and said how would you like an airplane you say sure where would you like it but and we have been criticized for this because immediately this exhibit open which was just seven or eight months ago you can we got phone calls to earlier and so on and so forth and the only comment we had for him was you know you didn't call us first if you had we would have put your airplane interesting story just off the nose of the Falcon jet you'll see a bi winged airplane there sitting on the deck in the background that's a Douglas m2 mail plane that airplane was restored it's in 1926 last of its kind the mail plane restored in 1977 by Western Airlines it used to be a Western air express airplane and they actually flew it from the west coast to Washington in 1970 second 1977 followed by an entourage of aircraft waiting for something to happen and it did and over New Mexico has a Liberty engine at Le Bleu and engine pilot had to make an emergency landing and we said oh boy there we are where are you gonna find a Liberty engine that's viable would you believe in the Santa Fe Museum they had one in a crate that had never been opened so we immediately got on the phone and made a trade with them right over the phone we'll give you such and such an engine now here's what we want you to do with your Liberty engine to take it out there and within a couple of days it was in the way fantastic World War one gallery recreates the the atmosphere if you will of a forward air base during World War one days and complete with sound and light and so on and so forth one of the airplanes we have in there is this Fokker d7 and the history on this is kind of interesting two days before the end of World War one a German count got in this airplane and defected if you will across the enemy lines landed an American air base and surrendered and he that the you ten on the side of the airplane from what we could finally figured out doing our research was that this was the the designation of the cavalry unit that he used to belong to before he joined the German air force a Messerschmitt 109 G interesting thing about this I was given a tour one day to a gentleman from the FAA right across the street and his American citizen and he casually said you know I've got almost five or six hundred hours in combat in that airplane to do that and said I was flying for the Israelis in 1948 and we were flying the surplus on all nines and I'd tried to find out what he was doing flying for the Israelis and they get great for flight testing the Bell P 59 a first the first u.s. jet-powered aircraft and I won't say the first operational because it wasn't it was not much of a success it was later used as a trainer the the p80 was the first successful operation the weenie may many people remember it of course for the Wiley Post around the world flights but really quite distinguished for the high altitude research flights that Wiley Post did in these and just to the right there you can see his pressure suit which is the first of his kind and successful the extra landing gear that you see there was an auxilary set that when he was doing his high-altitude work they took off the main gear put on that detachable landing gear when he got into the air he pulled a handle in the cockpit jettison the landing gear to get rid of the drag went up and did his high altitude flights and so on and came back cut the engine just before landing and and got the prop so it was three and nine o'clock and laid it on the skid there's a wooden skid and you can see it right there metal covered and he would land with no damage to the airplane Fogarty to first aircraft across the United States non-stop required the pilots to change seats if you will five different times twenty-seven hour trip so you can see why they did I like this airplane you all got our favorite airplane since the Curtis are three c2 as a racing plane of the 20s mid-20s Jimmy Doolittle flew it to a world speed record at 245 miles an hour but it has a couple of interesting features first of all the radiators in the wing corrugated wing and the some of the fuel tanks are actually in the pontoons the fuel was taken from the pontoons up through pipes and ugly to it to the engine block he's serious there on the right phone by the Lindbergh's together during their survey flights for Pan Am the nickname is ting miss our talk and it was it's an Eskimo name for one who flies like a big bird this is one of my favorite galleries probably because I was a curator of it when I first got there it's called the sea air gallery and it's designed to give you the impression of being on the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier the 76 simply means that every aircraft carrier in the Navy has a as a side number if you will a designation like 65 is the enterprise and 62 the independence well this was commissioned in 1976 so that's the 76 and what you see there is a quarterdeck and this is what the inside look looks like it's supposed to approximate the court the hangar deck on aircraft carrier we have four aircraft in here and you can just about see every one of them if you if you look hard then the upper right is that Doug Dauntless dive bomber from World War two the lower-right is a wildcat fighter lower left is a douglas a-4 jet and way up there in the upper left hand corner is another one of my favorites NF 4b Boeing this gallery has been a lot of fun this is a supposed to simulate what they call a primary fight control or pry fly in an aircraft carrier and that is the that's the control tower if you will and in that in the Profi installation you have the air boss air officer really and they call him the air boss and the assistant air boss and they are responsible for what happens on the flight deck of the carrier and in the traffic pattern well you can see them sitting there and we try to use mannequins wherever we can to create the atmosphere and we have caught people walking out of gallery with the air boss's head under their arms and so on but that's alright we took him down to the morgue and glued the head back on with Krazy Glue so you couldn't take it off but we really drew the line we probably took him out of the gallery if you couldn't fight the problem anymore this is this simulates the bridge of course the the command center if you will on a carrier and you can't see him but just to the left there's another mannequin that's the commanding officer and he's still there but let me tell you a little anecdote the night that this exhibit opened which was seven or eight years ago we had a very formal very nice reception in the gallery the secretary the Navy was there and made a nice speech dedicating or commissioning the carrier and so this was a selected group of yes I thought well by the time that the reception was over this is after working hours the the captain's insignia were gone his Eagles from his collar his brass belt buckle was gone and some packed we had real hair in him by the way and some patches are here were gone I said okay we have never put the insignia back on that's a loser we figured that out we finally solved the brass belt buckle problem we got about a five inch long screw and we just screwed the belt buckle right into his navel so now he has no we probably have to take him down about a year later he was getting completely bald because people just tear here off him so we gave him an artificial head and but he's still there surveying is domain out there this model is fantastic we get so many of our things there citizens like yourself we just call them Space Museum interested in this little aircraft carrier model that I built and that's what happened about three years ago and the gentleman from Colorado named Steve antenna chirp man so I just built this aircraft carrier in Milan if you'd like to have it we said yeah sure send us a picture he did and no hunters went out to Boulder Colorado this fella was building this 12-foot long model in a trailer and he'd built a wing so his trailer was like a nail he had built a wing onto the trailer just for his workshop to hold this 12-foot long you've been doing this for 11 years and he used to work for the Smithsonian he would travel all around the world and his job as a scientist for the Smithsonian he was in Peru South Africa Guam and everywhere he went he would pack this thing up in pieces and take it with him and continue on this is built the 1/100 scale and it's the USS enterprise exactly the way it looked in 1975 and he built it from scratch with no plans he managed to top the Navy and the letting him go on the carrier for two one-week trips to different times on the enterprise and it's just many of the airplanes on there a scratch built some from kits but what it modified part of it and he's just like an old mother hen every year he comes back to the east coast to visit his family for Thanksgiving and he's calling all the time has anything fallen over is everything all right the lights burned out down the hangar deck no and then so he will come and visit and he'll bring a little mint put them on there brings some other little modification that could not it's just he loves the model and I tell you it's one of the most popular exhibits in the museum particularly with the Japanese visitors great modelers anyway and they come in and take a look at that they just can't believe that it was that there's not a kit for that somewhere this is the general aviation gallery which no longer exists as of one month ago with one dedicated to the Golden Age of flight that period between 1919 and 1939 but I put this this slide in there because if I have to give this talk tomorrow night in Columbus and that is the spirit of Columbus hanging right there let me show you some before and after shots of some of my favorite airplanes this is a Corsair which I'm sure all of you recognized f4u-1 d and if anybody really cares there's an autograph from happy point and in the right hand wheel well the day we rolled this thing out in mint condition he with some of his old Black Sheep squadron showed up penis to visit so we had a big ceremony and he signed down on the wheel well that's what it looks like now I'm unfortunately it's not downtown anymore it's back out at the hill on display out there but it was my favorite airplane because I used to fly it for a while but here's the Messerschmitt 262 the first operational jet fighter in the world owned by the Germans in combat little known fact they built about 1400 of these airplanes well over a thousand airplanes and yet only about 400 400 of them they got into combat they had so many engine development problems which should appeal to some of you I'm sure there's what it looks like yeah we last week exactly a week ago had 3x Luftwaffe German generals in the museum Steinhoff günther Rall and Crippen ski and we had a little session just like this on much smaller scale and we put them up there on the platform we all fired questions out and now these are all retired generals I mean post-war steinhoff was the head of the German air force and retired with four stars and the others were lieutenant generals and between the three of them sitting there on a platform 648 kills row or two 648 victories that bothers some people to be able to sit in there and think that will achieve you know I wonder how many of those were Americans so here we are sitting here idolizing and and and these people but they got some they got some tough questions from the audience and they handled all of them very well they really did the toughest being well it when did you first see that you were going to lose a war and once you do something about it and pretty good this is the end line and the northrop flying wing all would totally falling apart and this is about half way through the restoration right here and here's what it looks like now I would like to be able to say this is the last flying wing in the world it isn't there was one out in the west coast that shino airport the n9m which was Northrop ii development in the flying wing field and it's being restored now to flyable condition now where we go from here I mentioned showing you what this downtown and I've shown you what's its silver Hill and there's one thing they all have in common all those airplanes are small except for the dc-3 this is the biggest airplane by the way the heaviest in the museum the 14,000 pounds we have airplanes down the desert at davis-monthan near Tucson original prototype of the Boeing 707 the - ATS is called is down there in mothballs we have a Martin PBM flying boat from World War two a boeing 307 transport in the postwar days we know we're gonna get a space shuttle and we're gonna get a Concorde it's been offered to us already so what do we do with these airplanes we have no place to put it if somebody said tomorrow here's a space shuttle we just have to say keep it because we don't have any place to put it so we have all kinds of verbal support and approval for a facility like this out of Dulles International Airport all we need some money and we hope that we'll go into this fiscal 85 budget there'll be a little study money in it and then next year they'll be a little bit more and we're hoping that it between three and five years from now you will see the first building of this complex of four not at Dulles and this is the way one artist sees the complex looking we want to be close to a runway so we can fly these airplanes in that's the reason for the whole these buildings will measure 250 by 300 feet they'll be at least 75 feet high to take airplanes like a Boeing 747 or the Space Shuttle will do it one building at a time and what our plan is that within 10 years we will have the four buildings and all you have just seen out at the Garber facility the Silver Eagle facility will be out at Dulles will move the restoration area the storage area the whole works out there what we really want to do is have the world's second best museum well the first bus is the one downtown national air in space dim Wooldridge has shown us why the National Air and Space Museum is one of the country's top attractions and he revealed some future plans for the museum thank you for watching this edition of NASA and Aeronautics this is Jim Burnett [Music] [Applause] [Music]