Museum of Flight!

The first Thursday of each month is free entry to all the museums in Seattle, so I decided to head over to the Boeing Museum of Flight after work. Boeing is started at Boeing Field just South of Seattle and makes planes here to this day. The museum is fairly big affair but given the sheer number of planes they have thats pretty understandable. On arrival you're confronted by a Concorde and an old Air Force One sat on the tarmac.

The queues were pretty long so I neglected to go aboard either of them and went indoors instead. The first hall is a massive glass hangar with planes all on the floor and strung from the ceiling in a scene reminiscent of the Airfix building era of my childhood:

In pride of place is the truly gargantuan Lockheed Blackbird supersonic stealth spyplane

At this point I could get incredibly boring about its awesomely powerful ramjet engines (Top speed Mach 3.1, yes thats 3 times the speed of sound), but I will try to resist and merely observe that 12 of the 32 of these ever built crashed, and none of those due to enemy action, mainly because if somebody fired a Surface-to-Air Missile at it, its evasive action was simply to accelerate away!
For the token photo of me for this post, enjoy this slightly dorky snap of me sat in a Blackbird cockpit they have set up:

Another cool sight was a MacDonnell F4 Phantom with its impressively painted underslung gun sat next to its Cold War nemesis a MiG 21:

In the foreground there is a German V1 Flying Bomb aka the infamous 'Doodlebug' of WWI.

After the main hall I had a wonder around the planes sat outside and took the opportunity to attempt a few artier photos:

There was also an exhibit devoted to the aircraft of the world wars, a bit of a Hollywood history (plenty of Supermarine Spitfire info, a single mention of the vastly more prolific Hawker Hurricane)
but some nice looking planes nonetheless:

And it nicely indulged the Biggles fan in me, cue Sopworth shots:

A Sopworth Pup reconstruction

And a Sopworth Camel.
An interesting quote from the German Ace Baron Von Richthofen made me chuckle "The Englishman is a smart fellow. That we must allow. They absolutely challenged us to battle, and never refused fighting. I prefer the English to those French Tricksters." Sadly they didn't have
 a lovely red Fokker Triplane, only a black one which didn't photograph all that well in the dark hall. But enough plane based banter, I'll leave you with a shot of the cute barn where Boeing first started out building planes:

 I've booked myself in on a learn to lead climb course, which starts this week so I'm looking forward to that and hopefully I'll start to get some results from the experiments I'm running at work, which will be satisfying after the stressful time I've had this last week recalibrating the PCR machine. Anyhow I've finished my coffee so I better sign off, I've got a bunch of photos from my stay at Anne's house this week so I'll try put those up soon.