Washington: Seattle – The Museum of Flight

May 2, 2019
Air
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✈️ A Lifelong Love Affair with Things That Fly

We have always loved aeroplanes. I know, I know — it is a slightly peculiar passion, given that I absolutely hate flying. Genuinely loathe it. The moment those engines spool up and the ground starts dropping away, something in my brain decides that this would be a perfectly good time to catastrophise. And yet, this entirely rational phobia has never once stopped us getting on a plane, which probably says more about my stubbornness than my sanity.

It goes beyond the personal, too. For a good chunk of my working life I have been in and around the aerospace industry, which means I have spent years surrounded by the very machines that give me the willies. The result of all this is that we cannot pass within a reasonable distance of an aerospace museum without being magnetically dragged inside. It is practically a condition.

🏙️ Seattle: Home of the World’s Most Famous Aircraft Maker

So, when we found ourselves heading to Seattle — which is, of course, the home of Boeing — there was really only one thing on the agenda. We had to visit the Museum of Flight.

Now, timing is everything in life, and our visit coincided with one of the darker chapters in modern aviation history. At the time of writing, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max-8 had plummeted to the ground, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second such crash in less than six months — the first being a Lion Air flight in October 2018 that killed 189 people off the coast of Indonesia. Both disasters were ultimately linked to a flawed automated flight control system called MCAS, and in the immediate aftermath, aviation regulators around the world grounded every single 737 Max in service whilst investigators tried to make sense of what had gone so terribly wrong.

The reason I mention all this is that the 737 aircraft are assembled in a vast factory right next door to the Museum of Flight. And as we approached, we could not help but notice the extraordinary spectacle of dozens of brand-new 737 Max aircraft sitting in the storage areas outside, gleaming and pristine, covered in the liveries of airlines from across the globe — airlines that would not, for the time being, be taking delivery of a single one of them. It was a genuinely arresting sight. Spectacular, in a slightly haunted sort of way. All that engineering, all those man-hours, all those future flights that would now have to wait. Tinged, inevitably, with a deep sadness for all those lost souls.

🏛️ A Museum Born of Necessity

The story of the Museum of Flight began, as many good things do, with a small group of enthusiasts who decided that somebody ought to do something. In 1964, a handful of aviation devotees in the Pacific Northwest noticed that historically significant artefacts — the physical evidence of how humanity had figured out flight — were disappearing at an alarming rate, either destroyed, sold off, or simply left to rot. Enough was enough.

The result was the Pacific Northwest Aviation Historical Foundation, established with the straightforward goal of saving these things for future generations. Their first public exhibition opened in 1965 in a 10,000 square-foot space at the Seattle Center, right in the shadow of the iconic Space Needle, which had itself only opened three years earlier as the centrepiece of the 1962 World’s Fair.

🏗️ The Red Barn and a 99-Year Lease

The museum’s permanent home began to take shape in 1975, when the Port of Seattle leased a parcel of land to the museum on a 99-year arrangement. The centrepiece of the plan was the Boeing Red Barn — the actual original factory building where the Boeing Company was founded, way back in 1916, by William Boeing himself, on the banks of the Duwamish River.

The Red Barn had been sitting in its original riverside location when someone, quite rightly, decided it was far too important to demolish. Rather than leave it where it was, the whole structure was loaded onto a river barge and floated to its current site on East Marginal Way South. A complete restoration followed in 1983, and the Red Barn became the first permanent home of the Museum of Flight. Which, you have to admit, is a rather good origin story for a museum dedicated to things that move.

Since then the museum has grown considerably. What started as a single restored barn is now a 15-acre campus housing over 160 aircraft and spacecraft, the restored Boeing factory, a collection of flight simulators, and dozens of hands-on exhibits and family activities. It has, in short, come a very long way from a 10,000 square-foot room near the Space Needle.

🌧️ Typically Seattle, Atypically Dry

As is pretty much traditional in Seattle, it was a grey, overcast day when we visited. The sky had the look of a man who has promised himself he will get round to raining soon but hasn’t quite committed yet. In a small mercy, the actual rain held off, and there were even one or two patches of blue sky doing their best to look optimistic against the general ashen backdrop.

Not that any of this particularly matters, because the museum has — with admirable pragmatism — made the whole thing weatherproof. Everything is under cover, including what might otherwise be the outdoor exhibits. This is, after all, the Pacific Northwest, where sensible people plan for the weather rather than hope for the best.

✈️ The T. A. Wilson Great Gallery — Where Serious Aviation History Lives

We made our way first into the T. A. Wilson Great Gallery, and honestly, it’s the sort of place that stops you dead in your tracks the moment you walk in. Named after Thornton Arnold “T. A.” Wilson, the legendary Boeing chief executive who steered the company through the development of the 747 in the late 1960s, this is no pokey little side room with a few dusty propellers on the wall. We’re talking about a purpose-built, six-storey glass-and-steel exhibition hall enclosing a frankly staggering three million cubic feet of space. To put that into some sort of perspective, you could comfortably fit several football pitches inside and still have room for a decent car park.

🛩️ Thirty-Nine Aircraft and a Very High Ceiling

Currently housing 39 full-size historic aircraft — and when they say full-size, they really do mean it — the gallery manages the neat trick of making enormous machines look almost graceful. The centrepiece, hanging from the space-frame ceiling in what the curators call a “flight attitude,” is a Douglas DC-3 weighing in at a rather solid nine tons. The DC-3, which first flew in December 1935, was arguably the aircraft that made commercial aviation genuinely viable. By the late 1930s it was carrying around 90% of the world’s airline passengers, which is a statistic that still manages to raise an eyebrow. Seeing one dangling overhead, frozen in mid-flight, was quite something.

🪟 Even on a Grey Day, and It Was a Grey Day

We visited on one of those typically overcast Pacific Northwest mornings — because of course we did — yet the gallery’s three glass walls flooded the entire space with a tremendous amount of diffused natural light. The exhibits were brilliantly illuminated without a harsh glare in sight, which is rather more than you can say for most museums, where half the exhibits appear to be lit by a single 40-watt bulb on a bad day.

🖤 The Lockheed M-21 Blackbird — Possibly the Sexiest Thing We’ve Ever Seen

The first aircraft that really grabbed our attention was the Lockheed M-21 Blackbird — and yes, we are using the word “sexy” in connection with an aeroplane, and no, we’re not embarrassed about it. The M-21 was a specialised variant of the legendary SR-71 family, developed in the early 1960s under Clarence “Kelly” Johnson at Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works facility in Burbank, California. It was designed to carry and launch the D-21 reconnaissance drone, which is exactly the sort of Cold War madness that sounds like it was dreamt up after someone’s fourth whisky. The aircraft is all raked angles, impossibly long fuselage, and a menacing all-black finish that makes it look like it was designed by someone who really, really wanted to upset the Soviet Union. Which, to be fair, was rather the point.

🚁 A Proper Mix — Fixed-Wing, Rotary, and Everything In Between

The gallery doesn’t restrict itself to jets, thankfully. The collection spans the full arc of aviation history, taking in both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters across a wide range of eras — from the early pioneering days of powered flight right through to the jet age. Alongside the aircraft themselves, the gallery is peppered with smaller exhibits of artefacts and well-produced information panels that add useful context without drowning you in text. It all hangs together rather well, which is more than can be said for some aviation museums we’ve visited, where the information panels seem to have been written by someone determined to make even supersonic flight sound like a planning application.

✈️ The Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing

My second port of call was the Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing, and if the Great Gallery had been all light and spectacle, this was something else entirely.

Named after Elroy McCaw — an American businessman and aviation enthusiast who donated generously to the Museum of Flight in Seattle — the wing is spread across two floors and a very substantial 88,000 square feet of space. It opened on 6th June 2004, which was, rather fittingly, the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Somebody in the planning office clearly had a sense of occasion.

Inside, across two galleries, sit 28 beautifully restored fighter aircraft from the First and Second World Wars. Spitfires, Fokkers, Hurricanes, Mustangs — the whole glorious, terrifying lot. Unlike the glass-walled Great Gallery next door, there were no windows here whatsoever. The lighting was dim and deliberately moody — partly to protect the more delicate artefacts from light damage, but the effect was something far more than practical. It created a sombre, almost reverential atmosphere that felt entirely appropriate.

When I was much younger, I had a genuine love for WWI and WWII aircraft. Dog fights, aces, the Battle of Britain — I was obsessed, as small boys of a certain era tended to be. And this trip brought all of that rushing back from whatever dusty corner of my memory it had been hiding in for the past few decades.

It was, in short, a very powerful experience — a combination of stunning exhibits, evocative imagery, and authentic period sounds that left me rather more moved than I’d expected. A grown man, mildly verklempt in front of a Spitfire. Nobody warned me to bring tissues.

BOEING RED BARN

🏚️ Boeing’s Red Barn — Where It All Began

Right next door to the Personal Courage Wing sits Boeing’s Red Barn, and if the museum had a beating heart, this would be it. Built in 1916, the structure served as the main office for Boeing’s original Plant 1 facility, right there on the Duwamish River in Seattle — back when the entire operation consisted of a handful of blokes with more ambition than actual aeronautical experience.

William Boeing himself had set up shop here, having bought the decrepit boatyard and shipyard site that same year, apparently deciding that building flying machines from timber and linen was a perfectly sensible way to spend a fortune. To be fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

Today, the old barn has been beautifully restored and transplanted to the museum grounds, and the whole place is awash in lovely natural light — presumably to help you read all the incredibly dense historical signage, of which there is a great deal. The exhibits chronicle the chaotic, glorious early years of American aerospace, from the rather optimistic beginnings of commercial aviation right through the barnstorming era and beyond.

It is, frankly, one of those places where you could lose an entire afternoon without really noticing. Every time we thought we’d seen everything, we’d turn a corner and find something else quietly remarkable tucked away in a corner. We could have done with considerably more time in here, though our feet had other opinions.

🚀 From Earth to Orbit — The Charles Simonyi Space Gallery

Having spent a good while wandering through the early days of aviation — biplanes, daring pioneers, and engines that sounded like they were held together with optimism and baling wire — we made the leap forward in time and technology to something altogether more ambitious. We moved on to man’s journey into space.

The Charles Simonyi Space Gallery at the Science Museum in London was opened in 2015 and is named after the Hungarian-American software billionaire Charles Simonyi, who — not content with co-developing Microsoft Word and Excel in the 1980s and making an absolute fortune — decided to spend some of it flying to the International Space Station. Twice. In 2007 and 2009. As you do when you’ve got a spare $35 million rattling around. The gallery is dedicated to humanity’s extraordinary, expensive, and frankly rather dangerous ambition to explore beyond the shelter of our home planet.

And it is, to be fair, a spectacular space. Pun absolutely intended.

🛸 The Star of the Show — NASA’s Full-Scale Space Shuttle Trainer

The centrepiece and undisputed star of the gallery is something that genuinely stopped us in our tracks: the only full-scale NASA Space Shuttle Trainer on public display outside the United States. This is not a model. This is not a replica knocked up for a museum opening. This is the real thing — a working trainer used by NASA astronauts to practise and prepare for actual Shuttle missions.

The Space Shuttle programme ran from 1981 to 2011, a thirty-year span during which NASA launched 135 missions. The Shuttle itself was a remarkable piece of engineering — a reusable spacecraft that took off like a rocket, orbited like a spacecraft, and landed like a very heavy, unpowered glider. What could possibly go wrong? Well, on two tragic occasions — Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 — the answer to that rhetorical question was rather a lot, and the programme carries those losses as part of its complicated legacy.

The trainer we were looking at was used to familiarise crews with the Shuttle’s systems, layout, and procedures without the minor inconvenience of actually being in space. It’s an exact replica of the flight deck and mid-deck, and standing beneath it, craning your neck upwards like a confused tourist outside the Shard, you get a proper sense of just how enormous the Shuttle actually was. Enormous, and yet the crew compartment itself was surprisingly compact — a bit like a very expensive caravan that happened to do 17,500 miles per hour.

✈️ The Aviation Gallery — Three Acres of Aeronautical Excess

Just past the Space Gallery, we found ourselves walking into what can only be described as an absolute cathedral of aviation. The Aviation Gallery covers three full acres — which, for those of us more accustomed to British semi-detached houses, is a frankly absurd amount of floor space — and it is packed with 19 rare and unique aircraft, both commercial and military. Trying to take it all in at once gave us the sort of neck ache usually reserved for watching Wimbledon.

🛩️ The Commercial Aircraft — From the 1930s to the Dreamliner

The commercial collection alone was worth the visit. Pride of place goes to the only supersonic Concorde on display on the entire West Coast of America. Now there’s a sight. Concorde, as most of us will remember with considerable fondness — or melancholy, depending on your mood — was the Anglo-French turbojet airliner that first flew in 1969 and entered commercial service in 1976 with British Airways and Air France. It cruised at Mach 2, which is roughly twice the speed of sound, or about 1,350 mph if you prefer numbers that actually mean something. It crossed the Atlantic in around three and a half hours, which is considerably less time than it takes to get through security at Heathrow these days. Concorde was retired in 2003, and we’ve been slowly travelling ever since.

Alongside it sat a Boeing 787 Dreamliner — a thoroughly modern wide-body aircraft that entered service in 2011 after a development programme so delayed it became something of an industry joke. But it is genuinely impressive: lighter than its predecessors thanks to composite materials, quieter and more fuel-efficient, with windows so large they make the whole experience of hurtling through the air at 35,000 feet feel almost pleasant.

🏛️ The Firsts — Boeing’s Greatest Hits

Then there were the firsts. The museum holds the first Boeing 727, the first Boeing 737 and the first Boeing 747 ever built, which is quite a trio when you stop to think about it. The 727 made its maiden flight in February 1963 — a narrow-body trijet that went on to become the workhorse of American domestic aviation throughout the 1960s and 70s. The 737, now the best-selling commercial jetliner in history, first flew in April 1967 — a fact that still prompts raised eyebrows given that versions of it are still being built today. And then there is the 747, the original Jumbo Jet, which first took to the skies in February 1969 and rather revolutionised mass air travel by making it accessible to people who weren’t either very wealthy or in the military.

📻 The Rare Ones — 1930s Airliners

For those of a historical bent, the museum also displayed two genuinely extraordinary aircraft from the 1930s: the Boeing 247D and the Douglas DC-2. The 247D, which first flew in 1933, was effectively the world’s first modern airliner — a low-wing, all-metal monoplane with retractable undercarriage that could carry ten passengers in something approaching comfort at speeds that made its predecessors look faintly embarrassed. United Airlines operated the type on transcontinental routes, and it changed what passengers expected from air travel. The Douglas DC-2, which followed in 1934, was its direct rival — faster, slightly larger, and the forerunner of the legendary DC-3 that would go on to define commercial aviation for the next two decades. Both aircraft are extraordinarily rare survivors, and seeing them under the same roof was genuinely rather special.

💣 The Military Aircraft — War in Three Acts

The military side of the collection was equally impressive, arranged in a loose chronology of conflict that reminded us, if we needed reminding, that an awful lot of aviation progress has been funded by people trying to blow each other up.

From the Second World War came a B-17 Flying Fortress and a B-29 Superfortress. The B-17, developed by Boeing in the mid-1930s and entering service with the US Army Air Corps in 1938, was the four-engine heavy bomber that became synonymous with the strategic bombing campaign over occupied Europe. The B-29 Superfortress was its larger, more technically ambitious successor — it was a B-29 named Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945, so it occupies a rather complex place in history.

Representing the Cold War was the B-47 Stratojet, Boeing’s swept-wing jet bomber that entered service in 1951 and gave the Strategic Air Command its long-range nuclear delivery capability throughout the 1950s. It looked extraordinary for its time — six jet engines slung in pods beneath a thin, flexible wing — and was essentially the aircraft that made everything that came after it possible.

And then there were the jet fighters: a span of machines covering the wars from Korea in the early 1950s all the way through to the Persian Gulf in the 1990s. Four decades of fighter design, in one room. We were there for quite some time.

In Summary …

If you’re anything like us and have spent the better part of your life gazing upwards every time something with wings goes overhead, then the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, really ought to be sitting somewhere near the top of your aerospace bucket list. And yes, we do have a bucket list. Don’t judge.

Seattle might be best known these days for overpriced coffee and a rather persistent drizzle that would make even a Mancunian feel at home, but tucked down on the south end of Boeing Field — officially King County International Airport, since you asked — sits one of the finest aerospace museums on the planet. It’s the sort of place that makes you feel simultaneously thrilled and deeply inadequate, because everything in there was built by people considerably more talented than the rest of us.

The museum has been around in one form or another since 1965, when a small group of aviation enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest decided that somebody ought to start preserving the extraordinary history being made right on their doorstep. Boeing, after all, had been building aircraft there since 1916, when William Boeing launched his first wood-and-fabric floatplane from Lake Union. The Red Barn — Boeing’s original 1909 manufacturing building — was moved to the museum site and still stands there today, which is either historically marvellous or a bit like keeping your first flat as a museum exhibit. Possibly both.

Planning your visit to the Boeing Museum of Flight …

✈️ Overview

The Museum of Flight is the world’s largest independent air and space museum, situated on a 23-acre campus at Seattle’s oldest airport. Spread across six buildings, the museum displays over 175 aircraft and spacecraft alongside tens of thousands of artefacts, rare photographs and immersive interactive exhibits. Whether you are a lifelong aviation enthusiast or simply curious about the history of human flight, the museum offers something genuinely compelling for all ages.

Highlights include the opportunity to step aboard the first Air Force One jet aircraft, walk through a Concorde supersonic airliner, explore a full-scale Space Shuttle Trainer, and marvel at Apollo moon rockets. The Great Gallery, a breathtaking six-storey glass structure, houses 43 aircraft suspended and displayed across its vast interior. The Aviation Pavilion allows visitors to go aboard historic aircraft and take virtual tours, whilst the Space Gallery brings the story of human spaceflight to life.

Beyond the static exhibits, the museum offers full-motion flight simulators, interactive play areas, free weekend workshops for families, and a regular programme of lectures, author events, special presentations, and evening talks.

📍 Location

9404 East Marginal Way South Seattle, WA 98108 United States

Free parking is available on site. The museum is well served by public transport and is accessible to visitors with disabilities, being fully ADA compliant.

🌐 Website

www.museumofflight.org

📞 Contact

Telephone: +1 (206) 764-5720 Email: info@museumofflight.org

🕙 Opening Times

Open daily, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm Aviation Pavilion aircraft access: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm

The museum is closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

Free First Thursdays: On the first Thursday of every month, the museum opens late with free admission from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

🎟️ Entry Fees

All prices include tax.

Children aged 4 and under: Free Youth (5–17): $21 Adults (18+): $29 Seniors (65+): $25 Museum Members: Free

A return visit discount is available if you come back within seven days of your initial visit — simply present your original receipt at the admissions desk.

Group discounts are available for parties of ten or more. A range of further concessions are offered, including reduced admission for US military personnel and veterans, Museums for All programme tickets for visitors receiving government assistance, and complimentary passes available through Seattle and King County Public Libraries.

Best time to visit Washington State

Washington State is one of the most climatically diverse destinations in the United States, ranging from the rain-soaked rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula to the sun-baked vineyards of the Yakima Valley and the volcanic grandeur of Mount Rainier. The best time to visit depends entirely on what you hope to experience — and every season brings its own character.

🌸 Spring (March–May)

Spring arrives gradually in Washington, with coastal and lowland areas warming ahead of the mountains. The Skagit Valley erupts into colour with one of North America’s most spectacular tulip displays, drawing visitors from across the world each April. Cherry blossoms frame the Capitol Campus in Olympia, hiking trails in the foothills begin to open, and the crowds that dominate summer have not yet arrived.

Temperatures range from around 10°C on cool March mornings to a pleasant 18°C by late May. Rainfall is frequent, particularly in western Washington, so expect a mix of sunshine and showers. The Cascade and Olympic mountain passes may still carry snow well into April, limiting access to some higher trails.

Spring is an excellent time for wildlife spotting — grey whales migrate along the Pacific coast, and wildflowers carpet the meadows of the Columbia Hills. It is also shoulder season, meaning accommodation prices are lower and popular sites are blissfully uncrowded.

What to pack: Waterproof jacket, lightweight thermal base layers, walking boots with good grip, packable umbrella, quick-dry trousers, sunglasses, and a mid-layer fleece for cool evenings.

☀️ Summer (June–August)

Summer is Washington’s undisputed high season. Western Washington finally sheds its grey skies for weeks of reliably warm, dry sunshine — Seattle averages just one inch of rainfall across July and August. Temperatures on the coast and in the cities hover between 22°C and 28°C, whilst eastern Washington — particularly the Tri-Cities and Walla Walla — can push well above 32°C.

This is the prime season for outdoor adventure: hiking to glaciers on Mount Rainier, kayaking the San Juan Islands, cycling the Palouse, and exploring the North Cascades. Ferry queues are long, campsite reservations fill months in advance, and Olympic National Park sees its highest foot traffic. The trade-off for all that sunshine is planning and booking ahead — spontaneous travel in summer can be frustrating.

Festivals abound: Seafair in Seattle, the Bumbershoot music and arts festival, and dozens of farmers’ markets and outdoor concerts across the state make summer a culturally rich time to visit.

What to pack: Sunscreen (SPF 50+), wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, light breathable layers, sturdy hiking boots or trail shoes, a light waterproof for unexpected showers, reusable water bottle, and insect repellent for forested areas.

🍂 Autumn (September–November)

Autumn is arguably Washington’s most underrated season. September retains much of summer’s warmth whilst the crowds thin rapidly after Labour Day. The eastern slopes of the Cascades ignite in amber, russet, and gold; the Leavenworth valley — Washington’s Bavarian-themed mountain town — is particularly dramatic in October. Wine enthusiasts flock to Walla Walla, Yakima, and the Columbia Valley for harvest season, when many wineries open their doors for tastings and tours.

Temperatures begin to drop noticeably from October onwards, and rainfall increases across western Washington. By November, the mountains are receiving early snowfall and some higher trails close. Coastal towns grow quiet, offering a serene atmosphere for those who prefer solitude over sunshine.

Birdwatchers are rewarded with impressive migratory waterfowl arrivals at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge and along the Columbia River. Mushroom foraging is also a beloved autumn pursuit in the Cascades’ forests.

What to pack: Warm mid-layers, a waterproof and windproof outer shell, scarf, light gloves, sturdy waterproof walking boots, warm hat, and a camera — the light in autumn is extraordinary.

❄️ Winter (December–February)

Winter transforms Washington into two very different destinations. In the mountains, resorts such as Crystal Mountain, Stevens Pass, and Mission Ridge offer excellent downhill skiing and snowboarding, with the Cascades receiving heavy, reliable snowfall. Snowshoeing and cross-country skiing on trails around Snoqualmie Pass are popular weekend pursuits for Seattleites.

In the lowlands and cities, winter is mild by American standards — Seattle rarely sees prolonged freezing temperatures — but it is grey, wet, and persistently overcast. This is, however, an excellent time to enjoy the city’s world-class food and coffee culture, visit the Seattle Art Museum, or explore the Pike Place Market without the summer scrum. Hotel prices drop considerably, and the atmosphere in smaller towns takes on an unhurried, local character.

The Pacific coast in winter has a raw, dramatic beauty — storm-watching from the shores of Long Beach or the rocky headlands of Cape Flattery is a genuine experience, particularly during periods of high swell.

What to pack: Heavy insulated coat, thermal base layers, waterproof over-trousers, waterproof boots with ankle support, warm gloves, wool hat, merino wool socks, and — if heading to ski areas — appropriate ski or snowboard gear.