This week I was sent to Seattle to sit reserve. I wasn't keen on the whole idea other than the fact that I had never been outside Seattle's airport. Venturing out wouldn't be entirely relaxing because I could receive a phone call at any time. I waited a couple hours this morning thinking they would be more likely to summon me earlier rather than later. I set out for Boeing's Museum of Flight about 8 miles down the road. I walked from my hotel to the airport, took the LINK (the light rail) a couple stops, then got a rideshare to take me the rest of the way.
It wasn't the cheapest museum I've been to, but it was actually bigger than I first thought. I thought it was going to be just this open exhibit hall you see above, but there was another section across the road and a few other hidden exhibits as well. I spent about an hour walking around the main area, checking out aircraft that ranged from an F-4 Phantom to a B-29 bomber from WW2 to an old 737. There was a control tower exhibit explaining how the Air Traffic Control network is set up. There was a viewpoint overlooking the airport and I watched a 737 land.
The photos may look funny in this post because my camera USB isn't working with my Surface so I had to resort to taking iPhone pictures of the camera's LCD screen. In any event, my next stop was the theater where I watched a film called Living in the Age of Airplanes. I'd been trying to see this for a while, but was never in the right city at the right time. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Narrated by Harrison Ford, it details the many ways that the airplane has changed our lives without us thinking about it.
It should be required viewing before you are allowed to check-in for a flight. It would put everyone in a better mood and folks might actually appreciate the crazy organized chaos of commercial flight. It spent probably five minutes just showing video or time-lapse of people at (formerly) isolated places like Iguazu Falls, Grand Canyon, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), or Angkor Wat. As it explained, there was a time when entire civilizations rose and fell without other civilizations around the world even knowing of their existence. It really is thought provoking. It went on to talk about things like overnight shipping and the presence of food or objects that can now exist in places where they shouldn't be able to exist -- like fresh tropical flowers in a vase in an Alaskan cabin. Everyone alive now has lived with airplanes so it's no longer all that impressive, but once you think about a world without airplanes, you realize just how much we need them. And they're really cool. As I was finishing up, I got called to fly to Boise in the middle of rain/snow flurries, but after seeing the movie, I couldn't complain.