In case you havent noticed, I like transportation. Especially trains and planes.
When I was in D.C. in February 2007 I toured the Smithsonians Air & Space Museum for the first time, and marveled at the great exhibits about the space program, aircraft carriers, jet airplanes, and so on.
But with my background in the travel industry what intrigued me most was a new exhibit being assembled and not yet open to the public. Enough of it was visible (for example a Northwest Airlines 747 nose section and an entire DC-3) for me to know this would be worth seeing on a subsequent visit.
And so late in 2007 the Smithsonian opened a new permanent exhibit at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC., entitled America by Air.
Lucky for me, I was able to go to D.C. again in January of this year for a friends retirement from Amtrak and had the opportunity to take it in.
America by Air is a well curated exhibit that provides an excellent historical context and chronology to the development of passenger air transport in this country. I took pleasure in the fact that it’s by no means solely about the transportation technology itself, but encompasses other topics related to building the industry such as stewardesses/flight attendants, air travel marketing, the advances in the reservations and ticketing processes, and more.
Here are some tidbits for you:
The first scheduled airline was The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. It operated for three months in 1914 between Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla. across Tampa Bay.
Transcontinental service was first offered from New York to Los Angeles in 1929 by Transcontinental Air Transport (predecessor to TWA) in conjunction with railroads. Passengers took a plane by day, transferred to a train for night travel, and then repeated the process once more.
As with all other Smithsonian museums, admission is free. If you have even a passing interest in the history of the airline industry this exhibit is a winner.
