The Nation's Hangar: Aircraft Treasures of the Smithsonian

(Paperback)

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Description

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. The Nation's Hangar charts the awe-inspiring history of flight around the world. F. Robert Van Der Linden, a Smithsonian curator and leading expert on aviation history, explains the fascinating stories behind aviation's great technological advances and provides historic and social context that highlights the many ways in which these innovations have changed the course of human history. The Nation's Hangar is also a visual delight. The Smithsonian aircraft collection has never looked so compelling and sleek. The Nation's Hangar is a must-have for that fly boy or fly girl in your flight pattern.

Reviews

LIBRARY JOURNAL, Starred Review

The Nations 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 centers accession criteria, principles of preservation, space, display, and funding challenges. Van der Lindens 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 worlds fastest jet-powered manned planethe 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 photographsa 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 Museums 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 Smithsonians 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 museums 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 criteriahistorical, technological, and practical standardsto 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 words 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.

Author Bio

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.