The Saga of Lunar Landscape

Published January 22, 2010 Behind The Scenes , Hidden Treasures , Highlights from the Collection , History , Stories , Web & New Media 2 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

For more than a decade it has been my privilege, among my other duties, to serve as curator of the National Air and Space Museum art collection. It comes as a surprise to many folks to realize that the Museum has an art collection. In fact, it includes over 4,700 works by artists with names like Daumier, Goya, Rauschenberg, Rockwell and Wyeth, and is perhaps the finest and best-rounded collection of aerospace-themed art held by any of the world’s museums. People who are aware that I manage the Museum’s art treasures occasionally ask if I have a favorite work in the collection, I do.

"Lunar Landscape" by Chesley Bonestell. Reproduced courtesy of Private Collection

Chesley Bonestell’s mural, Lunar Landscape, was unveiled at the Boston Science Museum’s Haydon Planetarium on March 28, 1957. “No spaceship reservations are needed for a startlingly realistic visit to the Moon” announced a museum press release.  Measuring forty feet long by ten feet tall, the dramatic panorama of the lunar surface was the masterwork of an artist who had done more than his fair share to set the stage for the coming of the Space Age.

Born in 1888, Chesley Bonestell grew up on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and survived the 1906 earthquake to emerge as a leading American architectural designer. Having left his artistic fingerprints on some of the best known structures of the era, including the façade of the Chrysler Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Golden Gate Bridge, he moved on to Hollywood, where his matte paintings provided the stunning backgrounds for such films as, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons. (1942).

Chesley Bonestell. Portrait by Ansel Adams, Gift of Pip and Frederick C. Durant, III

Always fascinated by astronomy, Bonestell began combining the best available science with his own artistry to produce paintings of the surface of other worlds. Life magazine published a spread of the artist’s extraterrestrial scenes in its issue of May 29, 1944. The editors of Mechanix Illustrated introduced their readers to Bonestell’s notion of a “Moon Rocket” in September 1945. In 1949, he collaborated with writer Willy Ley to produce the beautifully illustrated book, Conquest of Space. The next year, Bonestell teamed with producer George Pal and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to create a classic space flight film, Destination Moon (1950). The artist contributed illustrations to a series of eight Colliers magazine articles on space flight that began to appear in the spring of 1952, and to the books describing flights to the Moon and Mars that spun out of the magazine series. A generation of youngsters, myself among them, nursed dreams of interplanetary travel inspired by Chesley Bonestell’s dramatic visions of other worlds.

Bonestell was at the peak of his powers in 1956, when the Boston Museum of Science commissioned Lunar Landscape, a work on canvas that would take up an entire wall near the planetarium. As in the case of all of his paintings, the artist planned the mural in meticulous detail. He positioned the viewer on a spot 1300 feet up the south wall of an imaginary lunar crater (“similar to Albateguius, but smaller”), located seven degrees from the Moon’s North Pole and five degrees to the left of the center of the lunar disc. He went so far as to specify that it was 3 o’clock, Boston time, on a late June afternoon, and calculated the position of the planets and stars accordingly (Jupiter over the central peaks, Antares below and to the right of the Earth).

Continue reading ‘The Saga of Lunar Landscape‘

Lighthouses

Published January 11, 2010 Aviation , Highlights from the Collection , History , On View at the Museum , Stories Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

I was perusing that perennial bestseller, the FAA’s “Aeronautical Information Manual,” the other night, and ran across an intriguing reference to code beacons and course lights. Code beacons, in general, flash identifying information in Morse code; coded course lights are used with rotating beacons of the Federal Airway System, are highly directional, and are paired back-to-back pointed along the airway. What interested me was the appended note:

Airway beacons are remnants of the “lighted” airways which antedated the present electronically equipped federal airways system. Only a few of these beacons exist today to mark airway segments in remote mountain areas. Flashes in Morse code identify the beacon site.
(Aeronautical Information Manual, 2-2-2 Code Beacons and Course Lights)

Really? Some are still in service? I decided to investigate further.

As the Air Mail Service became better established in the 1920s and 30s, the Post Office and later the Aeronautics Branch of the U. S. Department of Commerce installed hundreds of lighted airway beacons across the country to facilitate night flying. They were spaced roughly ten miles apart; every third one had at least an emergency landing strip adjacent. Each tower carried a white rotating beacon with a 1,000W lamp and 24-inch diameter mirror, visible from all directions, plus the two course lights mentioned above. Airway beacons with a landing strip had green course markers, a detail reflected even today in the fact that the beacons for lighted land airports are green and white (seaplane airports are marked with yellow and white). Red course lights warned pilots that no safe haven would be found there. The beacons were numbered, and the last digit was coded by one of ten Morse code letters: W U V H R K D B G M, where W stood for “one”, U for “two”, and so on. Pilots memorized the phrase “When Undertaking Very Hard Routes, Keep Direction By Good Methods” to remember the order. By day, the locations could be identified by the number painted on the roof of the adjacent generator shed; a large concrete arrow set into the ground showed the direction to the next location. Remnants of these arrows are still found here and there, arousing curiosity among hikers and geocache hunters.

The first lighted airway beacon was installed in 1923; only five years later the earliest radio navigation aids began to spell the beacons’ obsolescence. Never hasty to abandon a proven system, the FAA did not decommission the last one until July 20, 1972, at Whitewater, California (near Palm Springs). The state of Montana, however, polled its pilot population and found that these aeronautical lighthouses were still valued as guides through the western mountains. Today, the Aeronautics Division of the Montana Department of Transportation maintains 16 beacons transferred from the Federal government – the only state to do so. The lights lead from Helena south to Monida Pass, north towards Great Falls, and west past Missoula to the Idaho state line. They bear romantic names like Mount Sentinel and Lookout Pass and are still shown on the Great Falls sectional chart.

Air Route Beacon in America by Air exhibition at the National Mall Building. Photo by Eric Long, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum received the last Federal airway beacon from the FAA in 1973, a year after it was taken out of service.  It stands in the America By Air gallery, rotating beacon flashing six times a minute, course lights patiently blinking long-long-short (“G”, meaning “nine”), as they have for over 70 years (see live web cam). The course lights are red, since there is no landing strip nearby, but the national aircraft collection has found a safe haven beside their beams nonetheless.

Anne McCombs is a restoration specialist in the Collections Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

The Whole Earth Disk: An Iconic Image of the Space Age

Published December 23, 2009 History , space 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Earth from Apollo 17. NASA Image #AS17-148-22727

Who has not seen the bright blue and white image of the Earth, swaddled in clouds and looking inviting, in numerous places and in various settings? Taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts on December 7, 1972, this photograph is one of the most widely distributed images in existence. It was the best one taken by these astronauts of a fully lit Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. Sometimes called the “blue marble,” this photograph taken during the translunar coast en route to the Moon, showed the Mediterranean Sea area in the north and extended to a good depiction of the to the Antarctic south polar ice cap. There was a heavy cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere but the majority of the coastline of Africa is clearly visible, especially the Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar, and portions of the Asian mainland.

As early as 1966, environmental activist Stewart Brand began a campaign for NASA to release an image of the whole Earth in space. Brand even made up buttons that asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Earth yet?” He sold them on college campuses and mailed them to prominent scientists, futurists, and legislators. Not until the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, however, did “Whole Earth” become a reality. As Brand recalled: “I was a big fan of NASA and of then ten years of space exploration that had gone up to that point, and there we were in 1966, having seen a lot of the moon and a lot of hunks of the Earth, but never the complete mandala… it was a bit odd that for ten years, with all the photographic apparatus in the world, we hadn’t turned the cameras that 180 degrees to look back.” This story has been told and retold in various ways, with some authors suggesting that Brand had alleged a NASA cover-up of secret photographs, although, his statements do not reflect this belief.

To capture this iconic image the astronaut/photographer used a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera with an 80-millimeter lens. It was virtually impossible to tell who on the Apollo 17 crew actually took the photograph—Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, or Harrison Schmitt—all of whom took many photographs with the Hasselblad cameras aboard the spacecraft during the mission. More recent analysis credits Schmitt with the photo, but it cannot be determined for certain.

Stewart Brand put the photograph on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog. This image, and the other stunning photographs of the Earth taken from space, inspired a reconsideration of our place in the universe.  It became the rallying cry of environmental activists, politicians, and scientists during the annual Earth Day celebrations. They used it as an object lesson of the Earth as a small, vulnerable, lonely, and fragile body teeming with life in a dull, black, lifeless void. While self-regulating and ancient, humanity proved a threat to this place. According to Brand and other ecologists, the Earth required human protection and the Whole Earth disk signaled its fragility.

Earthrise as seen from Apollo 8 spacecraft while orbiting the Moon in December, 1968. NASA Image #EL-2001-00365

The whole Earth image, as well as the earlier Earthrise photograph prompted the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Writer Archibald MacLeish summed up the feelings of many people when he wrote at the time of Apollo, that “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.” The modern environmental movement was galvanized in part by this new perception of the planet and the need to protect it and the life that it supports.

Roger D. Launius is senior curator in the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Antarctic Update

Published December 16, 2009 Planetary Science , Research 5 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

More notes from the field in this follow-up to: “From Earth to Mars: Studying Climate Change in Antarctica“

Post-doctoral fellow Maria Banks standing in front of C-17 after landing on the sea ice at McMurdo Station.

To get to Antarctica, I first flew on commercial flights from Washington, D.C. to Christchurch, New Zealand. While in Christchurch, I picked up special gear for the cold and harsh conditions in Antarctica from the US Antarctic Program Clothing Distribution Center. Several days later, I boarded a C-17 plane bound for McMurdo Station, Antarctica. In November, the temperatures are still cold enough that the sea ice surrounding McMurdo is used as a runway for aircraft. As I first stepped off the plane in Antarctica onto that expansive sheet of snow-covered ice, I was greeted by a blast of icy air, biting wind, and an amazing view of Mt. Erebus, the southernmost historically active volcano. It was so beautiful, it almost took my breath away!

View from Observation Hill of McMurdo Station on Ross Island, Antarctica.

Over the following week at McMurdo Station, I completed several safety and survival training courses to prepare for my departure into the deep field. The most memorable of these courses was snowmobile training, in which we had to drive “ski doos” through an obstacle course on the sea ice, and Snow Craft I, also known as “Happy Camper School.” At happy camper school, we were taught techniques for keeping warming, dealing with emergencies such as frost bite and hypothermia, how to set up various types of tents in the snow, find a lost person in a white out (with white buckets on our heads!), build a snow wall out of snow bricks, and spend the night in a survival trench.

Completed and furnished (with a sleeping bag rated for minus 40 degrees!) survival trench. A sled and some extra snow bricks are used as a roof. The sled has been pulled to the side to allow a view into the trench. Photo by Maria Banks.

There are also many opportunities for interesting hikes surrounding McMurdo and field trips to explore some of the wonders of Antarctica. I was lucky enough that on a field trip to an ice cave, I was visited by several Adelie penguins. While people are not allowed to approach and disturb wildlife in Antarctica, the penguins can do whatever they like! These Adelie penguins were very curious and came within roughly five feet to check us out before tobogganing (sliding on their bellies) off across the sea ice.

A group of Adelie penguins “hanging out” about 10 feet from the camera on the sea ice just outside of McMurdo Station. Photo by Maria Banks.

Soon I will depart for our remote field site to begin work on the drilling project and start a different type of adventure. We will arrive at this site via a four to five hour flight on a C-130 plane with skis!

Maria Banks is a post-doctoral fellow with the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/webimages/640/WEB11296-2009_640.jpg

Post-doctoral fellow Maria Banks standing in front of C-17 after landing on the sea ice at McMurdo Station.

The Critter Files

Published December 10, 2009 Archives , Hidden Treasures , History , New & Events , Stories , space 1 Comment
Tags: , ,

A girl, her pony, and a Piper J-3C Cub. Photograph by Hans Groenhoff, NASM HGC-1117

Museum intern Thomas Paone’s fascinating post on the funeral of Skippy, mascot of Navy Hedron 12, reminded me of my surprise – and delight – when I  started finding a surprising number of photographs of animals in the  files of the Museum archives. I had recently joined the National Air and Space Museum, and I guess I was expecting, well, air and space photographs. Those we had in plenty, of course, but also mobs of dogs, cats, horses, chimps, at least one woodchuck, an actual flying pig, and a famous lion. Later on, many of them made a public appearance in my book Animals Aloft. And on Sunday, December 13, some of them will even show up on TV when the video version of Animals Aloft premieres on the Smithsonian Channel.

Producer Gail Flannigan found wonderful old newsreel footage and recorded a number of compelling stories. My favorite may be the saga of Ham, the astronaut chimp, narrated by Benjamin Lawless – who knew Ham personally.

And here’s a short “behind the scenes” video – the camera and crew track in to a cold storage unit at the Museum’s Paul E. Garber Facility to reveal Gilmore, the famous far-flying lion mascot of aviator Roscoe Turner:

Hope you can tune in -  and if you know any good aviation animal tales, please share them with us in the comments.

Allan Janus is a museum specialist in the National Air and Space Museum’s Archives Division.

Hidden Gems

Published December 5, 2009 Archives , Aviation , Behind The Scenes , History , Stories 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , ,

It is hard to imagine how one can find anything amongst the thousands of photographs located at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.  In many cases, these are buried deep within a box containing hundreds that have no relation whatsoever to your topic.  These expeditions, however, can sometimes offer up hidden gems.  While hunting for images of navigators in World War II, a series appeared which, although completely distant from my topic, still grabbed my attention.  They were pictures of a military funeral.  These pictures were unique, however, because they were not showing the solemn burial of a soldier, airmen, or sailor; they were showing the burial of a unit mascot.  In times of war, men and women who face horrors and bloodshed on a daily basis often take refuge in the simple joys of life.  Throughout history, military units have often adopted animal mascots as a way to escape war, even if for just a few moments.  These animals were typically pets cared for by a unit, offering comfort and joy.  These animal mascots usually became an important part of a combat unit and were treated with reverence and respect as a member of the unit, just as any of their human counterparts.  The images below show just how much respect some military units would show towards their mascots.

Men of Hedron 12 standing at funeral for "Skippy". Photo courtesy NARA , #NARA RG 80-G 82603

Skippy is ‘embombed,’ placed in an empty bomb shell, and ready for a sea burial. Photo courtesy NARA, #NARA RG 80-G 82605

“Skippy”, whose identity has been lost to the annals of time, was the mascot of Hedron 12, or Headquarters Squadron 12.  Hedron 12 was stationed at the naval air station (NAS) in Banana River, Florida, which served during the Battle of the Atlantic as a base for Martin PBM Mariners of VP-201 to use while patrolling for German U-boats off the Florida coast.  Upon Skippy’s demise in September of 1943, the squadron saw it fit to take a moment in order to offer a proper funeral for their mascot.  The entire unit stood at attention while Skippy was placed in an empty bomb casing, or “embombed” as described in the pictures.  The casing was then attached to the wing of a Vought OS2U Kingfisher.   The OS2U Kingfisher was a sea plane used for offshore patrol at the NAS Banana River during the war.  After attached, Skippy was sent off with a final salute by the men of Hedron 12 to be dropped at sea.  Although offering no military significance, Skippy played an important role in the lives of the men of Hedron 12; important enough to be laid to rest with honor.

Bomb shell containing Skippy is placed on rack under the wing of a Vought OS2U Kingfisher. Photo courtesy NARA, #NARA RG 80-G 82602

For more information on animal mascots and their connection to flight, make sure to read Animals Aloft, by Allan Janus.  A video program based on the book premieres December 13 on the  Smithsonian Channel.

Thomas Paone is an intern in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

From Earth to Mars: Studying Climate Change in Antarctica

Published December 1, 2009 Planetary Science , Research 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , ,

I first became fascinated with glaciers during two summer seasons in Alaska while working on a cruise ship as a harpist. I would perform in a lounge at the top of the ship surrounded by windows and would watch in awe as we sailed past glaciers in Glacier Bay National Park as I performed. This was followed by three world cruises and many months sailing through Scandinavia where I was mesmerized by glaciers and icebergs in areas such as Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and Norway, and even sailed precariously through icebergs to reach the southern extend of the seasonal sea ice. One of my absolute favorite experiences was sailing through the gorgeous scenery of the narrow Norwegian Fjords. During my time off, I would escort tours to the glaciers and learn about the characteristic glacial terrain and how to climb and hike on top of the ice itself.

Maria Banks

Now, as a scientist and a post-doctoral fellow with the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum, I look at glaciers and ice sheets a little differently and have the opportunity to study them in detail. To understand more about ice sheets and climate change on Earth, I will be working for three months as part of an ice core drilling project (WAIS Divide Project) that will ultimately collect ice that was deposited as snow on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet over the last approximately 100,000 years. Layers in this ice contain clues to past climatic conditions on Earth and changes that have occurred over the last 100,000 years.  For example, air bubbles trapped in the ice contain greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane) which tell us the levels of these gases in the past and the chemical makeup of the water can be used as a thermometer to measure the temperature when the snow fell.

As a planetary geologist, I have also studied ice on Mars. Mars has both north and south polar caps, similar to the ice caps on Earth, that also contain layers with information about past climates and environmental conditions. Learning more about the clues hidden in the Earth’s ice layers will provide further insight into understanding what is recorded in the ice layers on Mars. Personally, I am also very excited about spending time in Antarctica as its low humidity and very cold temperatures make it the closest Earth analog for conditions on the surface of Mars. This is the closest I can get to experiencing what it would be like to live on Mars!

South polar cap of Mars in summer. Image taken by Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on April 17, 2000. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

My job in this project is to live at the field site on the ice sheet and work as a science technician handling, logging, and preparing ice cores as they are acquired, using an ice core drill called the DISC drill, to later be shipped back to the United States for analysis. I will do this for three months and will live in an unheated tent during the Antarctic summer!

To see a detailed report on my daily work and adventures in Antarctica, please visit my blog at: http://www.adventures-in-climate-change.com/adventures-in-climate-change/Antarctica/Antarctica.html

Maria Banks is a post-doctoral fellow with the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

Ultralights Are for the Birds

Published November 20, 2009 Aviation , On View at the Museum Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

Operation Migration ultralight flying with whooping cranes.

Add wildlife conservation to the growing list of special jobs that only ultralight aircraft can do. Right now, a volunteer group called Operation Migration is using Cosmos Phase II ultralights to lead a flock of endangered whooping cranes on the first migration of their young lives, from Wisconsin to Florida. The excellent control and performance of the ultralight at speeds much slower than more conventional aircraft makes this possible. After months of intensive training, the Operation Migration staff have trained the birds to follow the ultralight as though it were another crane. The birds were born in captivity to bolster the wild population which has fallen alarmingly in recent years.

For LIVE video of the migration, check CraneCam each day from 6:30am to 10:00am and then in the afternoon from 3:30pm to 4:30pm just before sunset. TrikeCam is also available LIVE whenever the migration is airborne. These majestic birds are large and slow, and the distance they can cover in a day, or whether they fly at all, very much depends on good weather.

Cosmos Phase II ultralight, used by Operation Migration and featured in the film "Fly Away Home", on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

To find out more, please visit the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The Ultralight Exhibit Station on the southwest side of the aircraft hanger, explains with words, photographs, and artifacts, how ultralights evolved from hang gliders, and what research led Operation Migration to develop the complex ultralight migration protocols, with help from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Canadian Wildlife Service, Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, U. S. G. S. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and other wildlife conservation groups. The exhibit shows the special techniques and hardware developed by Operation Migration to train the birds. Displayed nearby is a Cosmos Phase II ultralight aircraft that led birds in past migrations, and appeared in the Hollywood film, Fly Away Home starring Anna Paquin.

Russell Lee is a curator in the National Air and Space Museum’s Aeronautics Division.

The Envelope, Please

Published November 11, 2009 Archives , Aviation , Highlights from the Collection 3 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

Lee Ya-Ching stepping from the cockpit of her Stinson SR-9B Reliant "Spirit of New China", c.1939. NASM-9A06062, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives.

Balancing access and preservation is a continuous problem in every archive. The Museum’s Archives Division’s mandate is two-fold; to make collections accessible for researchers, and to preserve the collections for future generations. These two goals came into conflict while processing the Lee Ya-Ching Collection.

Lee Ya-Ching (1912-1998) was a Chinese aviatrix. During World War II she visited North and South America on a goodwill tour to raise money for the Chinese war effort. After the war, she returned to China. The collection of her papers from her stay in the Americas was buried for safekeeping. Many years later the collection came to light and was eventually donated to the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division. Years of being buried caused numerous conservation issues.

As a processor and the archives conservator, it was my job to determine how these materials are handled. As an archivist, I want the researcher to have access to as much of the collection as possible. As a conservator, I want to protect the materials. When moldy items were found, they were immediately removed from the collection, as mold is a known health hazard to staff and researchers, as well as being detrimental to the collection itself.

Other issues were not as easy to handle. One of these was a large number of sealed envelopes in the collection. Some of these were opened by Lee Ya-Ching and had become resealed by years of storage in damp conditions. The dilemma came when deciding what to do with envelopes that appeared to have never been opened. Should these letters be opened so that researchers can read the contents, or should they be left sealed? Arguments on both sides of the debate had me conflicted as to what to do. Sealed envelopes speak to the character of the individual. Information not received can influence decisions as much as information received. We as processors are obligated to process without influencing the story. Opening these letters alter the interpretation of this woman’s experiences.

Conversely, opening these envelopes gives the researchers access to more information. If these envelopes aren’t opened, researchers would have to be cautioned to leave them intact. Without opening the envelopes, we don’t know what types of materials are inside. Photographs, film, even certain inks and papers could be harmful to the collections.

After much discussion with colleagues, both in and outside the Museum, a final decision has yet to be made. The majority of archivists polled feel the envelopes should be opened, but that they should be segregated and marked as being sealed envelopes opened by the archivist. This would allow access by archivists for conservation and by scholars for research; however, they will know that Lee Ya-Ching did not have the information contained in these envelopes during her lifetime.  Please let us know what you think by posting a comment below.

Here’s more on Lee Ya-Ching – an article from Air & Space/Smithsonian Magazine, a blog post that includes a scene from a Hollywood film, Disputed Passage (1939) featuring Lee Ya-Ching, and a comic book (PDF format) on her wartime adventures.

Jordan Ferraro is an Archivist in the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division.

Saving Jenny

Published November 6, 2009 Aviation , Behind The Scenes , Exhibitions , Highlights from the Collection , On View at the Museum , Stories , restoration 9 Comments
Tags: , ,

The Curtiss JN-4D Jenny on display in the America by Air exhibition. The aircraft was on display at the Mall Museum from November 17, 2007, until it was removed last week. Photo by Eric Long, Smithsonian, National Air and Space Museum.

The Curtiss JN-4D Jenny is arguably one of the most famous aircraft designs in aviation history, at least U.S. aviation history.  Like the DC-3, the Piper Cub, the P-51 Mustang, the Boeing 707, and the F-4 Phantom, to name just a few, the Jenny remains a classic and an all-time favorite of anyone with an interest in airplanes.  Associated with one of the great figures of early aviation, Glenn H. Curtiss, and playing key roles as a trainer, an airmail plane, and a barnstorming aircraft in the late ‘teens and 1920s, the Jenny is a signature aircraft of the period when the airplane was evolving from a new invention to a viable technology that was beginning to have great influence in broad ways.  From the perspective of historical significance to the “nuts and bolts,” ya gotta just love the Jenny.

One of my first experiences that hooked me on early aviation was seeing an original Jenny fly back in 1972 at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.  As the low-powered, frail biplane winged its way gently and slowly around the field, I imagined what it must have been like to learn to fly when wings were new.  Many years later, I had the good fortune to become the curator of the early aircraft collections at the National Air and Space Museum.  Among those aircraft is one of the best remaining examples of a Curtiss Jenny.  The Smithsonian acquired its Jenny in 1918, only days after the Armistice ending World War I.  The airplane was re-covered in the 1920s, and remains completely original from that time.  The Museum’s Jenny is one of the true jewels of the collection.  It has a particular place of pride in my curatorial responsibilities, and the whole museum staff has a great soft spot in our hearts for our Jenny.  When the opportunity to put it on display in the Mall museum presented itself with the building of the new commercial aviation exhibition, America by Air, a few years ago, I was delighted to make it available to the curator of the new gallery.  When the exhibition opened in 2007, it was a great success and the Jenny looked fabulous on its perch, drawing visitors toward America by Air.  A museum favorite finally was center stage for all to enjoy.

Damage to Curtiss JN-4D Jenny tail fabric. Photo by Dane Penland, Smithsonian, National Air and Space Museum.

Sadly, last week, our beautiful Curtiss Jenny had to be removed from America by Air.  Being completely original with fabric more than 80 years old, the Jenny is one of the most fragile aircraft in the Museum’s collection.  Even a gentle bump can puncture or split the fabric covering.  Mounted on stands displaying it out of arm’s reach from the floor of the gallery, we thought our treasured Jenny would be safe and sound.  What we didn’t anticipate was the “attack” from the air, from the second floor balcony above.  The vast majority of our visitors could not be more well behaved, and treat our collections and displays with the reverence they deserve.  But with several million visitors a year passing through our exhibits, you can’t avoid a few bad sorts with destructive tendencies.  It seems this tiny percentage of disrespectful souls had taken to using the Jenny for target practice with everything from coins to hard candy.  As a result, the airplane now has more than a dozen holes in it from objects dropped or thrown from above.  The situation had gotten bad enough that the aircraft had to be removed from display.  We were facing a “death by a thousand cuts” situation.  It pains me to have to take such an historic aircraft off display, and deny our visitors to America by Air the chance to see this beautiful example of this true classic.  But as the old saying goes, sometimes a few ruin it for the majority.  To preserve the Jenny, it had to be taken out of harm’s way.  It will be relocated to the Udvar-Hazy Center and placed in a more secure setting.  So visitors will still be able to see it.  Just no longer in the rich context and attractive setting of the America by Air gallery.

Curtiss JN-4D Jenny at Udvar-Hazy Center awaiting reassembly for display. Photo by Dane Penland, Smithsonian, National Air and Space Museum.

Peter L. Jakab is the National Air and Space Museum’s Associate Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs, and Curator of the Early Flight and World War I Aircraft collections.

Next Page »

Connect with us on

Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
Facebook National Mall Building
Facebook Udvar-Hazy Center

Twitter Updates

Flickr Photos

Apollo 11 Crew at the National Air and Space Museum

More Photos