Aviation Museums Where the Imagination Can Soar

To avoid choosing between “Birthplace of Aviation” Ohio (packed with attractions related to the lives and work of the Wright brothers) and “First in Flight” North Carolina (home to Kitty Hawk and the brothers’ famous first flight in 1903), head to the Washington area to explore aviation’s earliest days. Certainly stop by the National Air and Space Museum or the equally marvelous Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. But start at the College Park Aviation Museum in College Park, Md., a “cradle of aviation” based at (who knew?) the oldest continuously operated airport on the planet.

The unsung history of College Park starts, appropriately, with a Wright brother. Wilbur Wright went there in 1909 to train America’s first military pilots. The world’s first commercial airline pilot, Tony Jannus, started training there the next year. College Park also claims the first military pilot to join, in 1912, the Mile High club (no, not a pioneer among aerial Casanovas; he flew a mile high); the country’s first regular airmail service, in 1918; and several innovative flights “on instruments” (achievements that Leslie Nielsen honors with a brief musical interlude in the movie “Airplane!” which still inspires a good third of the jokes I hear in the 747’s cockpit).

The College Park museum is friendly, quiet and beautifully designed by the same firm that did the National Air and Space Museum. Under the vast wall of windows facing the still-active runway are exhibits on the airport’s history, as well as a fine collection of vintage aircraft and reproductions. My favorite is the 1916 Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny.” You may recognize it from that famous 1918 run of misprinted postage stamps (one of which Richard Pryor buys, then mails, in “Brewster’s Millions”). America’s first mass-production airplanes, JN-4s (called the Model Ts of the heavens) were pivotal to the military, airmail and the halcyon days of barnstorming that introduced so many Americans to the wonder of flight. Collegeparkaviationmuseum.com; admission, $4.

Entering the Museum of Flight in Seattle, one of the world’s largest private aviation museums, you will pass under the wistful words of Leonardo da Vinci high on the wall of the airy, light-filled lobby: If flight “be not for me, ’tis for some other. The Spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings. …” Surely da Vinci would have enjoyed both Louis C.K.’s famous riff on flying (“You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now”) and this museum. It’s the perfect place to trace the history of what modern air travelers take for granted.

Like the caravels and galleons of previous eras, airliners refashioned our sense of the planet. So head first for the 1909 Red Barn, a former shipyard, appropriately enough, that gave birth to some of the earliest Boeing airplanes. Its plaque says it is believed to be the oldest airplane factory in the country.

The Museum of Flight tells a much larger story than Boeing’s, though. Don’t miss the exhibitions on such forgotten luminaries as Dorothy Hester Stenzel, the record-setting 1920s and ’30s aerobatics champion known as “Princess Kick a Hole in the Sky”; the colorful displays of vintage advertisements (“Individual lighting is built right into your seat”… “AIR MAIL is Socially Correct”); and the multifloor exhibition filled with airplanes from almost every era of flight. Leave time, too, for the cafe, where the view of the planes outside, not to mention treats like the Concorde sandwich (peanut butter and grape jelly, of course) will have you falling in love with the window seat, and airplane food, all over again. Museumofflight.org; admission, $20.

In the 1690s, Peter the Great of Russia worked incognito (more or less) in English and Dutch ports, hoping to steal a tip or two from their renowned shipwrights. It’s no surprise, then, that when you take the Boeing tour at the Future of Flight Aviation Center wide-body jet factory in Everett, Wash., you’ll need to leave outside not only cameras and phones, but also notebooks. If a 90-minute visit to a factory (even one that gave birth to the 747) doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, think again. At nearly 100 acres, the floor space of the Boeing Everett Factory isn’t much less than Vatican City’s. By volume, it is the largest building on earth, home to a sort of indoor sky so immense that clouds once formed inside it.

Visitors enter the factory through a series of subterranean tunnels, and then head upward. When the gate of the cavernous freight elevator at last clangs open, you will find yourself perched on a set of platforms high up in a space so vast that you almost immediately, and disconcertingly, lose the sense of being indoors. Nearly everyone on my tour was awed into silence. At first you see few of the nearly 40,000 workers who cover three shifts here. It’s tempting to speculate what Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist who depicted factories and workers (and the occasional airplane), would have made of the inhuman scale.

Another surprise (though perhaps it shouldn’t be) is the three-dimensionality of the enterprise. The term “factory floor” doesn’t do justice to a space in which enormous airplane parts float on cranes through the building’s upper altitudes, and ingenious structures allow workers to move high over the multistory jetliners as if they were as lowly as cars, while in every direction brightly vertical tailplanes, branded with a veritable United Nations General Assembly of airline logos, rise like new sails.

Later, I had a chance to ask Capt. Mark Feuerstein, Boeing’s chief 747 test pilot, some questions. What does it feel like to watch the construction of a plane he knows he will be the first to take into the air? Apparently there is not much tire-kicking, but plenty of childlike wonder as he becomes, in his words, “familiar with the entire creation of one particular airplane over a fairly long period of time.” His perspective is extraordinary, but it hints at the title of the Dr. Seuss book that visitors may recall as they watch a new jet roll toward the blue sky that waits beyond a set of nearly football-field-size doors: “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” Futureofflight.org; admission, from $16 (book online, and early).

Fourteen years into my flying career and I’m still charmed by aviation’s maritime heritage, revealed by terms like “forward” and “aft,” “rudder” and “deck,” “skipper” and “log,” as well as by neologisms like “air-liner” and “air-port” that modern ears no longer disassemble. But the sky owes another debt to the sea. Many great cities were founded as ports, or grew to their current prominence largely because of their positions on the ocean. If planes today cross thousands of miles to certain cities, it’s in part because great ships once did the same.

Singapore, established as a trading post by Sir Stamford Raffles (who incidentally was born at sea), perfectly reflects such historical symmetries between the air and water. In 1822, three years after the city’s founding, 139 square-rigged ships and more than 1,000 shorter-range vessels called at the port, and Raffles could report that the population exceeded “10,000 inhabitants of all nations.” Today both the seaport and airport of this ultra-globalized city-state are among the world’s busiest.

There is no better place to contemplate the aero and the nautical (and to catch some rays) than Changi Beach Park — especially if your friends’ vacation radar is more attuned to “beach” than “Boeing.” Advance reading is Lincoln Paine’s “Sea and Civilization,” which frames the maritime realm that gave birth to cities like Singapore and gave language to flight, too.

To get there take the MRT subway to Tampines station and jump on bus No. 19. Get off at Car Park 2, grab some cold drinks, rent a bike and head east along the bike path. To your left are azure tropical waters, a pristine beach and signs that strictly prohibit parasailing, kite flying and pretty much anything else that raises your vertical profile. You’ll soon see (and hear) why: Just above the swaying palm fronds one enormous jet after another flies past, descending over the sparkling sea in the last moments of their journeys from the farthest corners of the world.

Eventually the bike path turns south and parallels the full length of Changi Airport’s massive runways — a reminder that airports are their own landscapes, measured in miles. Put on your sunglasses and your favorite playlist, and as you pedal and puff along the runway’s edge, you can be forgiven for thinking of a certain scene from the movie “Top Gun.” Although with a basket-equipped bike instead of a Kawasaki motorcycle, and the gentle-giant Airbus A380s in the distance rather than F-14s, it’s more suggestive of Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” than Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone.”

When your playlist ends, return your bike and have a dip in the sea before getting dinner at Bistro@Changi. I went for the calamari (8 Singapore dollars, or $5.50 at 1.37 Singapore dollars to the U.S. dollar, Thursday to Sunday only) but stayed for the satay (11.90 Singapore dollars). Afterward your waiter will call a cab to take you back to the subway station, or to the airport itself, where an airliner — its red and green navigation lights arranged as if on a ship — is waiting to take you pretty much anywhere you would like to go.

With air shows, museums, history centers and plane-spotting sites, there is a world of aviation-related attractions out there, whether or not you’re an incorrigible “aviation geek” (#avgeek on Twitter) like me. Some other top choices:

Imperial War Museum, Duxford, England. If you’re looking for a day trip from London, head to Duxford. The museum, Britain’s answer to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, offers exhibitions, programs and a fine collection of military and civilian aircraft (including a Concorde) at a historic airfield that was “built for war” and was therefore well known to generations of American aviators. The American Air Museum, designed by Norman Foster, is closed until spring 2016, but there is plenty else to see until then. Admission: £15.90 (about $23 at $1.46 to the pound). www.iwm.org.uk.

In-N-Out Burger, Los Angeles. A stone’s throw from Los Angeles International Airport, the branch of the California burger chain at West 92nd Street and South Sepulveda Boulevard offers sunshine, Double-Double Cheeseburgers and some of the world’s best plane spotting. When you’re done, order a copy of Jeffrey Milstein’s “AirCraft: The Jet as Art,” a book of stunning photographs of airplanes taken from below.

1940 Air Terminal Museum, Houston. This lovely museum of the golden age of air travel, set in a disused Art Deco terminal, is based at William P. Hobby Airport. It pairs well with a visit to the Space Center Houston or a long layover at the city’s larger George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Admission, $5. 1940airterminal.org.

The Central Museum of the Air Forces, Russia. Situated at Monino Airfield, about 20 miles outside Moscow, this is the most important museum focusing on Russian and Soviet aircraft in the world. Although I haven’t yet visited it, the museum has been at the top of my list since Captain Feuerstein, Boeing’s chief test pilot for the 747, recommended it to me. “Quite the experience,” he said, and he would know. You can see the TU-144 supersonic airliner (the “Concordski”), an experimental model for the Russian space shuttle program, and — for fans of the recent Steven Spielberg release, “Bridge of Spies” — the uniform Francis Gary Powers was wearing when his U-2 spy plane was shot down. Check before visiting to confirm hours and entry restrictions. Moninoaviation.com.