The Udvar-Hazy Center: The Museum That Couldn't Fit in Washington

The National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington is one of the most visited museums in the world. But it has a problem: it can only display about three hundred of the Smithsonian's aircraft and spacecraft, out of a collection numbering in the thousands. For decades, the overflow sat in storage or was loaned to other institutions. Then a Hungarian-born American businessman named Steven Udvar-Hazy donated sixty-five million dollars to solve the problem.

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center opened in December of two thousand three, next to Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia. The location was chosen because the airport's runways could accommodate the delivery of large aircraft, which would be towed or flown directly into the facility. The main hangar, one of the largest aviation facilities in the world, stretches over seven hundred feet in length and rises ten stories at its peak.

What fills it is extraordinary. The Space Shuttle Discovery, which flew thirty-nine missions over twenty-seven years and traveled more than a hundred and forty-eight million miles in orbit, is the centerpiece of the space pavilion. The Boeing B-twenty-nine Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August sixth, nineteen forty-five, hangs from the ceiling in the aviation hangar. Visitors can stand directly beneath it.

The collection also includes the Lockheed SR-seventy-one Blackbird, the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever built, capable of flying from New York to London in under two hours, and the Air France Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet that crossed the Atlantic in roughly the same time.

Steven Udvar-Hazy came to the United States from Hungary as a teenager and built one of the largest aircraft leasing companies in the world. His gift created the largest aviation museum on earth, and it sits right here, a few miles west of Dulles, easy to miss and impossible to forget if you stop.