National Air And Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center

Reading audio



2004-1-6

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

This is Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And this is Steve Ember with
EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Last month, the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum opened its new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy
(OOD-var HAH-zee) Center in Virginia, near Washington, D-C. Today we
tell about this new museum for famous aircraft.

(THEME)

VOICE ONE:

The new Udvar-Hazy Center has been open for a little more than
three weeks. However, it has already proven to be extremely popular.
On December twenty-sixth, the road leading to the new museum was
blocked with vehicles. Local television stations showed pictures of
thousands of automobiles waiting their turn to enter the museum's
parking area. Some vehicles were turned away. There was not enough
room. The parking area was full. The new center may prove to be as
popular as the main Air and Space Museum in Washington.

VOICE TWO:

The National Air and Space Museum is perhaps the most visited
museum in the world. Almost ten-million people visit the museum ever
year to see famous aircraft. They can see the Wright Brothers famous
flyer. It was the first controllable aircraft to fly with an engine.
It flew for the first time on December Seventeenth,
nineteen-oh-three.

Visitors to the National Air and Space Museum can also see
Charles Lindbergh's airplane, "The Spirit of Saint Louis." He became
the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone and without
stopping, from the United States to France. That flight took place
in May of nineteen-twenty-seven.

Near the famous plane is an orange
rocket plane that became the first aircraft to fly faster than the
speed of sound. Pilot Chuck Yeager made that flight in
nineteen-forty-seven. Visitors to the museum can even touch a small
piece of the moon. It was brought back to Earth by American
astronauts who walked on the moon.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

The main job of a museum is to keep and protect important objects
from the past so they can be studied, examined and enjoyed in the
future. Displaying these collected objects helps the public
understand the importance of a museum's work.

Finding room to keep a collection of aircraft has always been a
problem for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. This
museum only holds about ten percent of the aircraft it has collected
over the years.

Another ten percent of the aircraft have been loaned to other
museums. The other eighty percent have been kept in storage
buildings for safekeeping. Some of them have been stored for as long
as fifty years.

The opening of the Museum's new Udvar-Hazy Center has changed
this. As many as three-hundred aircraft will be placed on display in
the new museum. More than eighty of them have already been placed in
the building for the public to see.

VOICE TWO:

The new center was named for
Steven Udvar-Hazy. He came to the United States from Hungary. He
became very successful in the aircraft industry. He became so
successful that he gave the National Air and Space Museum
sixty-five-million dollars to help build the new center.

Mister Udvar-Hazy said he wanted to give something to America for
the opportunities he found here. He also wanted to pass on his love
of aviation to the people of the future.

VOICE ONE:

Mister Udvar-Hazy's gift helped build the center. It did not pay
the total cost. That is expected to be more than
three-hundred-million dollars. This includes the design,
construction and cost of moving the aircraft into the new center.

The largest of the new center's several buildings is huge. It is
thirty-one meters high, almost seventy-six meters wide, and
three-hundred meters long.

Visitors can see and walk near the aircraft on three levels in
the main building. They can walk near the largest aircraft on the
museum's floor. Smaller aircraft are hung from the ceiling. Visitors
can examine them from several walkways that are about fifteen meters
above the floor. They can see other aircraft that are hung near the
ceiling. They can do this from walkways that are near the top of the
building.

Computers at small information centers show close-up photographs
of the aircraft. These photographs include pictures taken inside the
aircraft. Visitors can use the computers to see the pilot's
controls, passenger areas and other parts of the inside of the
aircraft. In the future, these pictures will be on the new museum's
computer link with the Internet.

VOICE TWO:

All of the aircraft that will be on display are important to the
history of flight. Some are huge. The largest aircraft in the
collection was given to the museum only a few months ago. It is the
Air France Concorde.

The plane landed at nearby Dulles International Airport on its
last flight. It was pulled by a special vehicle to the museum.

The Concorde was one of the few passenger airplanes that could
fly faster than the speed of sound. A Concorde flight from Paris,
France to Washington, D-C usually took less than four hours.

The new center also has very small aircraft in the collection.
One is the Boeing P-Twenty-Six-A Peashooter. The little Peashooter
could hide under the wing of the Concorde. In fact, several of them
could hide there.

The Peashooter was a military fighter plane. It was built in the
early nineteen-thirties. It is also one of the most beautiful
aircraft in the new center. Most military aircraft are not painted
with bright colors. But the Peashooter has wings painted
yellow-gold. The body is painted black with white strips down its
side. The front is painted a shiny white.

VOICE ONE:

The new Udvar-Hazy Center also holds the fastest aircraft every
built. It is the Lockheed S-R-Seventy-One Blackbird. It looks like a
rocket plane, but it is not. It has an aircraft jet engine, not a
rocket engine. The military used the Blackbird to gather
intelligence. It carried cameras, not guns. It used its great speed
to fly away from danger.

The Blackbird is a large aircraft. It is painted with a dull
black paint and looks like a bullet. In fact it is faster than many
bullets. It could travel at three times the speed of sound.

That is about three-thousand-five-hundred-forty kilometers an
hour. The last time a Blackbird flew was from Los Angeles,
California to Dulles International Airport near the museum.

The United States Air Force flew it for the last time to deliver
it to the Udvar-Hazy Center. That flight from California to Virginia
took only one hour, four minutes and twenty seconds.

VOICE TWO:

Many of the aircraft in the collection were built for military
use. However, the museum is not a just a collection of military
aircraft. Aviation experts say new flight technology has often been
used first in the design of military aircraft. For example, the
first jet was a military airplane. Civilian aircraft designers
quickly used jet technology because jets are faster and cheaper.

An aircraft called the Dash-Eighty is a good example of military
technology being used for civilian purposes. The Boeing Company
built the aircraft. Its real name is the Boeing
Three-Six-Seven-dash-Eighty.

It was designed as the first modern jet passenger aircraft. It
first flew in July of nineteen-fifty-four. It does not look much
different from aircraft used today by airlines around the world.
Later, a similar aircraft was given the numbers Seven-Oh-Seven. The
Seven-Oh-Seven was the first extremely successful passenger jet
aircraft. It served as the first jet aircraft for many of the
world's passenger airlines. The Dash-Eighty looks very new, not
fifty years old.

(MUSIC)

VOICE ONE:

National Air and Space Museum officials say they expect about
three-million visitors a year to the new center. Many of these
visitors will be school children. The center includes schoolrooms
and will provide teachers with teaching materials.

One of the center's goals will be to educate the children of the
future about the importance of aviation.

Smithsonian officials recognize that it is difficult for many
people to visit either of these two flight museums. In the near
future, they hope to display photographs and information about all
the aircraft on the Internet.

You can already visit the museum if you have a computer that can
link with the Internet. The Internet address is WWW.NASM.SI.EDU. Or
have your computer search for the letters N-A-S-M.

(THEME)

VOICE TWO:

This program was written by Paul Thompson and produced by Mario
Ritter.


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