The Nation's Hangar- Aircraft Treasures of the Smithsonian offers a fascinating textual and visual history of civilian, military, and commercial aviation from the earliest balloon flights to today's most advanced aircraft.
F. ROBERT VAN DER LINDEN is the curator of special purpose aircraft and commercial aviation in the Smithsonian Institution National Air & Space Museum's Aeronautics Division. He is also the author of Best of the National Air & Space Museum. The author lives in Boyds, Maryland.
LIBRARY JOURNAL, Starred Review
The Nation’s Hangar: Aircraft Treasures of the Smithsonian takes
the reader on a fascinating journey through 60-odd years of
aeronautical history. He reviews the priceless aircraft and
artifacts currently housed in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a
mammoth four-hangar repository, and discusses the center’s
accession criteria, principles of preservation, space, display, and
funding challenges. Van der Linden’s informative narrative
acquaints readers with such period exhibits as international
military fighters and bombers, passenger liners, helicopters,
seaplanes, recreational and racing craft, utility flyers such as
crop dusters, and the world’s fastest jet-powered manned plane—the
U.S. SR-71 Blackbird. Equally compelling is his treatment of the
talented people who bankrolled, designed, maintained, flew, and
finally restored these magnificent birds to their pristine glory.
His volume is replete with more than 225 full-color illustrations
and 75 black-and-white photographs—a visual feast. VERDICT This
splendidly crafted pictorial tribute to a national treasure will
appeal to the full spectrum of aviation scholars, collectors, and
dedicated buffs. Highly recommended.—John Carver Edwards, Univ. of
Georgia Libs., Cleveland
American Heritage
As the National Air and Space Museum’s director boasts in his
foreword, the Smithsonian was interested in aeronautical matters
even before aviation was invented, having begun collecting Chinese
kites in 1876. This descriptive catalogue celebrates the latest
addition to Smithsonian’s family of museums, the huge NASM annex
known as the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located 30 miles from the
National Mall at Dulles International Airport. The book is
instructive, straightforward, laudatory, and colorful in its
photographs.
Notably, the chapter on “Restoration and Conservation” purposefully
describes the criteria for acquiring, stabilizing, and preserving
artifacts. Proper stewardship does not, for example, make all old
objects look spanking new. Much of value of museum-quality holdings
lies in their antiquity, including the scars of their experience.
At best, a museum’s proper goal in handling some objects is simply
to stabilize them in perpetuity, while a proper activity is not
simply to collect as many examples of this-and-that as it can find.
NASM consequently has defined clear criteria—historical,
technological, and practical standards—to govern its acquisitions.
While here is the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first
atomic bomb in anger, and there the Concorde, the fastest
commercial airliner ever, museums are not properly halls merely of
“oh, wow!” They must also be educational, historiographic, and
conservative in the word’s original sense.
Discussions of “The Early Years of Flight” and the “The Golden Age
of Flight” provide overviews of those eras, with heavy emphasis on
the airplanes and other flying machines on display at the
Udvar-Hazy Center. Three chapters are devoted to military aircraft
and the exploits of U.S. aviators in wartime.
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