The Flight Deck

How do you build a rocket engine without blowing your factory up? Vern Estes took on this assignment as one of his first tasks in the family business of model rocket manufacturing. In today’s podcast episode, he recalls reaching the challenging goal of creating a machine that could quickly, and safely, pack model rocket engines to keep up with the voracious demand from a public eager to launch the...

Before the Wright Brothers and airplanes, hot air balloons dominated the skies. Today we’re going to explore the origin of the hot air balloon, and we’re going to do it with an old time radio show: the original podcast. First aired September 17, 1946, ‘The Birth of the Balloon’ is a dramatized recreation of what people in 1946 thought the early days of ballooning might have been like based on thei...

Former NASA Astronaut Wendy Lawrence is a veteran both of the Untied States Navy and four NASA Space Shuttle missions – including the Return to Flight mission following the Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster. In today’s episode, she talks about how she had to stop thinking of Russians as Cold War enemy and start thinking of them as space-bound allies, how she mapped out her future into space as a tee...

Flying fish from the Civil War era. Jetpacks with dolls. Planes in a bottle. As with any museum, only a fraction of The Museum of Flight’s collection is on display. In today’s episode, members of the Museum’s Collections team discuss some of the curios they’ve come across during their work, all of which are features on The Museum of Flight’s Collections Instagram. Read the full shownotes (and find...

Picture this: You’re a doctor on an aircraft carrier. You’re awoken and told of an emergency on the lowest decks of the ship. You rush down staircase after staircase and find a sailor, his legs crushed by an elevator that’s stuck. You need to amputate or he’ll likely die. You don’t have time to go get your full kit. All you have on you is a pocketknife. This was Hank Davis’ reality, as he shares i...

We’re celebrating the opening of our new temporary exhibit Stranger Than Fiction: The Incredible Story of Aerospace Medicine by chatting with Hank Davis, a former flight surgeon on the USS Coral Sea. He talks about the grueling medical and aviation training he undertook to practice medicine aboard an aircraft carrier, tending to the needs of the aviators above and the crew below. https://blog.muse...

What does it take to turn real-life war stories into a game? Jason Morningstar, Creative Director of Bully Pulpit Games, released the tabletop roleplaying game Night Witches in 2015 with the goal of connecting players with the history of Soviet women who flew night raids over the Nazis during World War II. In this episode of The Flight Deck, he and host Sean Mobley discuss the true stories and peo...

Teasel Muir-Harmony, Curator of the Apollo program at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, once again joins host Sean Mobley in this conclusion to the two-episode series on the political history of the Apollo program. In this episode, she talks about the classic 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and its place in Apollo political history, how domestic and international perceptions of the Apollo p...

Returning guest Teasel Muir-Harmony, Curator of the Apollo program at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, joins host Sean Mobley for a Q&A about her book Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo. In this first of a two-part series, Teasel sets the stage and talks about the wider global context within which the US space program operated. We discussed the American politic...

This episode takes a break from talking aviation and space history to have a conversation with someone making history right now. Bryné Hadnott, a science writer and founder of Space Out STEM. With a career that has ranged from hard space science to historical writing, Bryné is a rising star in the aerospace and science fields. Fortunately for The Museum of Flight, she’s also a mentor for the Micha...

Evoking images of glamorous air travel and high society, the Boeing 314 Clipper is one of the most romanticized aircraft in history. These massive flying boats ferried passengers, mostly for PanAm, to Hawaii and other vacation destinations. Museum of Flight Docent Bill McCutcheon shares the history of the Clipper, its prominent use by the government during World War II, and the legacy of this shor...

Naval Dentist Tom Davidson yearned to score a spot in the back seat of one of the fighter planes of the flight group he was assigned to. After patient waiting, his opportunity for a joyride finally came. After landing from the exhilarating experience, he started writing a letter to his family detailing the thrill of flight…but he never finished or sent that letter. Tom shares a deeply personal sto...

Unbridled wonder. The sort of joy that just seems to radiate out at you. That is the subject of today’s podcast episode, where Museum of Flight President and CEO Matt Hayes takes us back over 100 years to an historic aviation event in Los Angeles, captured in a photo of four women found in our Museum’s digital archives. He talks about the marvels the women may have been witnessing, as this was the...

An aviation conspiracy dating back 100 years continues to capture the imaginations of New Zealanders. What’s the truth behind this story, involving secret caves, military secrets, and the first Boeing airplane? Host Sean Mobley sat down with Museum of Flight Docent Leslie Czechowski to dig into this curious episode of aerospace history which spans continents and centuries. Full Show Notes: www.mus...

You may know Alexander Graham Bell for his telephone, but did you know he had a hand in some of the most bizarre, strange-looking experimental aviation designs? Today’s episode is a chat with Museum of Flight Curator Matthew Burchette (of “Curator on the Loose” fame) about these bonkers designs and the adventure of experimentation in the early days of contemporary aviation, when hopeful engineers...

In this final episode of 2020, we welcome author Phil Stamper onto the show for a discussion of adapting space history into fiction for a modern young adult audience, the literary inspirations for his book The Gravity of Us, and the realities LGBTQ+ astronauts faced throughout NASA history from Sally Ride all the way back to the days of Project Mercury. View full shownotes here: https://blog.museu...

What happens at the end of the world? Today’s episode is the finale of the playthrough of “Before There Were Stars,” a storytelling game about creating myths based on constellations. Join a team of science educators from around the world as they follow in the footsteps of the ancient storytellers and look to the stars for inspiration and a way to describe the world around them, bringing their stor...

Join a team of storytellers as they look up at the stars to create myths and legends based on what they see. Today’s episode is Part I of a playthrough of the storytelling family game “Before There Were Stars,” featuring science educators from around the world improvising a creation myth based on images seen in an imaginary night sky. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the story.   You can keep the podcas...

We think of history in terms of grand, sweeping events and often forget that actual humans are at the center of it. Today’s episode reminds us that people drive history, everyday people like you and me who are swept up or have to react to these larger events. The discussion centers around Mike Caputo, a World War II B-24 Navigator, and his daughter Yvonne, the woman who helped him open up about th...

It’s common to hear a visitor to The Museum of Flight wonder how astronauts go to the bathroom in space. Today is the continuation of a conversation with Museum of Flight staff member Brenda Mandt, who spearheads the tours of the Museum’s NASA Space Shuttle Full Fuselage Trainer, where she talks about modern space toilets on the Space Shuttle and on the ISS. She also talks about what did and didn’...

“How do astronauts go to the bathroom in space?” This is a question we hear often at the Museum, asked by people young and old from all around the world. Host Sean Mobley enlisted Museum of Flight expert Brenda Mandt, one of the masterminds behind the Museum’s NASA Space Shuttle Full Fuselage Trainer Tours, to investigate how humans carry out this universal body function in space. In this first of...

Bill Wilson, a Vietnam Veteran and Museum of Flight Docent, features in this episode of The Flight Deck, sharing his story of bailing out of his crashing General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark just a few miles from Hanoi, the capital of the Communist government of Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. Surrounded by hills, jungle, and enemy combatants, Wilson did everything he could to evade capture long enoug...

Museum of Flight Docent Jerry Coy returns to The Flight Deck to share a story of survival behind enemy lines. When Captain Roger Locher’s McDonnell F-4 Phantom was hit by fire from a Vietnamese MiG-21, he safely bailed out…only to realize he was months away by foot from safety, and was deep in Communist territory, making an air rescue extremely dangerous. In order to extract him, the Air Force wou...

Wrapping up the Collections miniseries, today we’re looking at the oldest artifact in our archives. To find it, we need to go back behind-the-scenes, into the Rare Book Room of the Museum’s Harl V. Brackin library to find an object that predates the US Constitution.

Located in the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, an exhibit space dedicated to modern space exploration, you’ll find the youngest artifact in our collection: An American flag flown to space on the historic Blue Origin New Shepard NS-3 Launch. In today’s episode of the Flight Deck, we’ll take a look at the flag and it’s story, and also learn why stories are at the heart of any museum…and how the stori...