Skip to main content

A Day Learning about Early Aviation



Yesterday, I went on a day long tour of early aviation artifacts and sites located in the Washington DC area organized by Smithsonian Associates (link to tour)

The tour was lead by Paul Glenshaw.  Paul was acknowledged for his help by David McCullough in his book :"The Wright Brothers", a book I read in preparation of this tour.

We first visited the National Air and Space Museum to view the early Wright gliders, and of course,the 1903 Wright Flyer.

We also saw Lilienthal's early glider, and the Langley Aerodrome.  #5.  This aircraft was flown successfully unmanned near my home, off of Chopawamsic Island (map) itself just off Quantico Marine Base.

The next visit was the Smithsonian Castle.  The garden there was the site of Professor Langley's construction of the Aerodrome.  
'
Afterwards we visited Haines Point, site of the unsuccessful attempt to fly the powered Aerodrome by pilot Charles Manly.

Next was the Air Force Memorial.  And then Fort Meyer, where in 1908 Orville Wright demonstrated the Wright airplane for the U.S. Army.  On one test flight, the plane crashed, injuring Orville, and killing Lt. Thomas Selfridge, making Selfridge the first airplane fatality.

In 1909 Orville successfully demonstrated the airplane's usefulness to the US Army at Fort Meyer.  As part of the contract to sell a plane to the Army, the Wrights had to train two pilots.  That training was done at College Park.  After the Wright's left, training continued at the nascent College Park Airport, the oldest airport in the world.

The College Park Aviation Museum was our final visit.

I chose some photographs from the many I took, and captioned and shared them.

Note: click the first photo, and then Info button
to see captions and a map where the photo was taken.  Hover your mouse over the right edge of the photo for an arrow to the next photo.



Google Assistant did the same programmatically.

This post was my way of documenting and remembering the day, but thought others might enjoy it too, if for no other reason then to know about the wonderful resource that is Smithsonian Associates.


Note: This blog post contains one Amazon Affiliate Link.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Notes Folder : My new note taking system

I'm in the process of moving to a new way to keep my notes. It would be best to make a separate post on my long time notetaking app, Evernote, and how it now disappoints me.  Bottom line, I no longer trust the company behind Evernote since it was acquired. My first inclination was to finally look at alternatives. like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. of I was not enamored with any of them, so I gritted my teeth and stayed with Evernote. TThe situation made me think about how I use Evernote. To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder Updates : January 24, 2024 and in updates noted here. Most of the things I store are quick notes, lists, online receipts for online bills, that sort of thing.  Kind of an online file cabinet if you will. If I were a doctoral student though I could see storing PDFs of papers and research materials.  If were working on a large project, then plans, communications etc. would all be there. Back when I began using Evernote way b

Recording your own notes with Google Voice

Note :   April 2016:  Frankly I don't know if this works anymore.  It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th

Ten Years of Evernote

This blog post was set to publish exactly as the day begins on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. That is ten years to the day after my first Evernote  post. With my second note, I was already getting down to business; recording the agreement I'd come to on the phone on a minor business matter. My affection for Evernote has not dimmed since that day ten years ago. Since then, I've accumulated about 7.8 new notes a day. Ironically, I have needed to pull up only a few notes a year. Yet, when I need them, I need them badly and am glad to have Evernote all over again. My philosophy of what to capture is simple : If you encounter something you might remotely want to see again, it goes into Evernote. from a blog post June 1, 2015 I've written here about Evernote than any other topic.  Even wrote a now horribly out-of-date book. Don't get me wrong. If something better comes along that imports my Evernote notes well, I can be enticed to move.  But in t