Museum Review - Museum of Flight

As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of air museums, and have been to (and reviewed) almost all of the major air museums in the US. The last really big one that I hadn't been to was the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and on a recent visit there to see family, I finally made it, and quite enjoyed what I found.

Website

I should probably start by saying that the Museum of Flight isn't really one museum. It's more like three or four different museums in a trenchcoat, all stuck together on a campus near Boeing Field in Renton, south of downtown Seattle, which is also the home of the 737 production line.¹ There's a pretty cool collection of warbirds from both World Wars, a very neat exhibit inside the Red Barn that served as Boeing's first factory on how early airplanes were built, an uninspiring space museum and a somewhat random collection of other planes, both indoors and out, that definitely showed the museum's connection with Seattle's biggest airplane company. But there's not a lot of coherence here, and the campus layout is even more obviously the result of a staged expansion than the Stafford Museum, the previous holder of the title.

Now, to be clear, everything is very competently executed, and signage was superb throughout. If you tried to read everything, you'd be there at least two full days, maybe more. And that makes it quite friendly to people who aren't aviation geeks, to the point that it's probably my recommendation for people of that type who want a museum west of the Mississippi.

The Great Gallery with the first half of the history of airliners, including a Boeing 80 and a DC-3

I think you're supposed to start in the "Great Gallery", which is where all of the publicity shots come from. From admissions, you go past a number of replicas from the early days of flight (Montgolfiers, Lilienthal and the Wrights) to the main space, which starts off talking about the early days of commercial aviation, in particular through the eyes of the company run by William Boeing, who at one point came close to dominating the entire airmail system before his company was broken up into Boeing, United Airlines and Pratt & Whitney. The fact that Boeing has a major presence literally next door to the museum and has been a long-time major donor is pretty obvious, although the museum has enough editorial independence to have Flying Blind in the gift shop. Then there's a bunch of 30s-era civilian planes, followed by an F-86 and MiG-15, and then an XF8U-1 Crusader. All cool stuff, but it's not clear what the connection is. Up above is mostly a grab-bag of jets, while in the center of the gallery is an M-21/D-21 (SR-71 derivative) with an F-4 Phantom and a Huey behind it. There's also a neat UAV display and a section called "the tower" that talks about both basics of flight and air traffic control. It's all a bit weirdly laid out, though the individual pieces are pretty neat. There's also an Apollo gallery, which is weirdly lacking in artifacts. For such a big museum, it doesn't even have a flown Apollo capsule, and the exhibits are weirdly obsessed with Pete Conrad, probably because they somehow got a donation of a bunch of his stuff.² Probably the coolest thing in there was a bunch of recovered F-1 engine parts from flown Saturn Vs, donated by some local guy named Jeff.

Bulbasaur was very interested in the way old planes were built

The next thing you come to is the gift shop, which I will say is head and shoulders above that of any other air museum I've ever been to, at least so far as potential damage to my wallet is concerned. It's only thanks to the fact that I had limited luggage space that I avoided buying several hundred dollars worth of books. Past that is the "Red Barn" that served as Boeing's first factory. The first floor of it is mostly an exhibit that mixes the early days of Boeing with the best presentation I've ever seen on how airplanes were built back in the days of wood and fabric. Lots of fun details, illustrated by replica parts, up to a couple of fuselages stripped down to show how they are put together. Above that is a look at Boeing products from the mid-30s with the 247 and the 314 Clipper to the B-52 and the 707. I enjoyed the artifacts they had, but that's also an era that I like a lot, and your mileage may vary. The Red Barn also has their temporary exhibit space, which while we were there was talking about a MiG-21 covered in art, on display in the outside section.

The Caproni Ca.20

Right past the Red Barn is the cafe, which is expensive but has a lovely view of the runway at Boeing Field, and we got to see a 737 take off for its third-ever flight while we ate. It's next to the "Personal Courage Wing", which is the preposterous name for their warbird gallery, with WWI upstairs and WWII downstairs. The WWI exhibit is the best I've ever seen on that era, although a lot of the planes are replicas, and it's extremely focused on fighters to the exclusion of everything else. Still, there were a couple of real gems, most notably the Caproni Ca.20, probably the earliest surviving fighter. The WWII section is pretty generic, with the only unusual planes being a Ki-43 and a Yak-9, but well executed all the same. Again, though, there was nothing in the gallery that wasn't a fighter, which I think gives a rather distorted view of the air war. It would be trivial to replace, say, their P-51 with a Dauntless to solve this, but that doesn't seem to be on the agenda.

F-1 engine parts, not in the space section because there's nothing interesting there

Across the street (there's a covered bridge between the two, but it's not insulated) is the space gallery, which was built in the hopes of receiving a space shuttle. That didn't happen, and they instead ended up with a big mockup. This gallery was actively disappointing, being exactly the sort of "introduction to space" section you've seen in every local science museum, with a big wooden space shuttle in the middle of the room. There was nothing particularly interesting in the gallery, and it's mostly useful as a warm room on that side of the street before you venture out into the outdoor aircraft pavilion that has probably the most interesting part of the collection.

The 747 and 787 prototypes

This is where they keep the big stuff, which includes one of three Concordes in the country, some random military planes that they ended up with, and a bunch of planes from the museum's major benefactor, Boeing. There's a B-17, a B-29, a B-47, one of the 707-based Air Force Ones, as well as the prototypes of the 727, 737, 747 and 787. Walkthroughs of the Concorde, Air Force One, 727, 747 and 787 are available, although we skipped the first two because of lines and the third because the walkthroughs close at 4, an hour before the rest of the museum. But the ones we did get to were cool, particularly the 747, which talked a lot about flight testing, and they also had a DC-2 outside, which I initially mistook for a DC-3 before I read the sign. The biggest problem was that we visited in December, and it was pretty cold, but the area is covered, so it should still be doable when it's raining. Behind the pavilion is the B-52 park, which is notable only in displaying a B-52G instead of the B-52Ds you find in most other places. Beyond that, it's a B-52 with some signs about Vietnam, and not really worth going to see when it's cold or (probably) raining.

One of eight remaining DC-2s

I feel rather conflicted about the Museum of Flight. It's not a bad museum by any means, and I certainly enjoyed my visit. In particular, it has probably the strongest commercial aviation collection in the country, an area I have some interest in. But it also feels like there's a lot of missed opportunities here to turn a random pile of airplanes into something coherent, and it ultimately was my least-favorite of the major air museums.