The first half of today is being spent enriching ourselves at Boeing's Field Museum. So far we've seen their original Red Barn factory from the dawn of aerospace and up to to World War I and II. I find the World War I exhibits most fascinating, at a time when planes were a new combat technology and pilots considered "Knights of the Sky." We've stopped for lunch at the museum cafe, before going on a tour of the Concorde and Air Force One, where I overpaid for my chili and PBJ sandwich. Oh well, it was good at least.
Lunch is spent calculating how long it would take to fly a Concorde to the sun.
Later: We drool over one of the remaining Lockheed SR-71 Blackbirds (actually the M-21 with its drone plane on top), and muse over the car-plane that was close to mass production by Ford in the '60s.
Also, Nate and I managed to break the flight simulator. I tried to describe how to execute an Immelman turn, and as he was at its apex something flew off inside the cabin with a loud POP and we went into a tailspin, then the operator shut the system down on us. Thankfully we weren't stuck upside down, but had to be righted manually.
Oops.
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Cool! I was at the museum just last month, though I was short on time, as it was the last day of the trip and we got there only shortly before they closed. I wanted to do the flight simulator but the line was too long.
ReplyDeleteRE: The Concorde -- How long did you figure it'd take and what modifications were made so that it could make the trip? Is this a manned flight?
Heh, I don't think this is what we came up with at lunch since we were working with rough estimates, but at an unmodified Concorde's average cruising speed of Mach 2.02 it would take close to 8 years to get to the Sun. Of course we decided since you'd burn up or asphyxiate well before then (not to mention run out of fuel), it was kind of silly to consider.
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