Van der Linden - The Nations Hangar: Aircraft Treasures of the Smithsonian

The Lockheed SR-71 dominates this view of the interior of the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center, flanked by the Curtiss P-40 on the left and the Vought F4U Corsair on the right, with the Space Shuttle behind it.

T he year 2011 marks a significant milestone in the history of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM). Since the opening of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003, the Museum has actively worked to complete Phase Two of the project, namely the design and construction of a state-of-the-art preservation, restoration, and storage facility. After much hard work, this has come to pass. The facilities completed during Phase Two of the Udvar-Hazy Center construction replace the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility as the primary restoration and storage facility for NASM. Named after the Museums first curator, a visionary who collected most of the NASMs most influential and historically significant pieces, the Garber Facility had served the Museum for 60 years. It was time for a change.

Tucked away in Silver Hill, a corner of Prince Georges County, Maryland, seven miles from downtown Washington, the Garber Facility is rather nondescript. Surrounded by rundown strip malls and gas stations, a lone Polaris missile sits upright in the parking lot along Old Silver Hill Road, next to the local fire department. Visible behind the perimeter fencing is an unobtrusive sand-colored building with a large blue-and-gold seal of the Smithsonian Institution hanging prominently on the front wall. As inconspicuous as it may be, until the opening of the Udvar-Hazy Center this was the entrance to Valhalla for the aviation enthusiast.

Paul Edward Garber, aircraft collector without peer, almost single-handedly built the worlds finest collection of aeronautical artifacts in his 70-year career at the Smithsonian Institution.

There are 33 buildings at the Garber Facility, shared between NASM, the National Museum of American History, and other support organizations of the Smithsonian. Before the move to the Udvar-Hazy Center, NASM used 23 of these buildings. Eighteen were used for shipping and receiving, dense storage, and support functions, especially as an annex for NASMs Archives Division, and the other five contained thousands of aviation treasures. These buildings were accessible to the public for some time through specially guided tours, but in later years were closed to the public. With the completion of Phases One and Two of the Udvar-Hazy Center, the functions of many of these buildings are combined in one new massive, high-tech structure that features a restoration hangar four times larger than the one at the Garber Facility.

As extensive as the National Aeronautical Collection is, the problem of finding enough space to house the aircraft and spacecraft properly has dominated NASMs planning since the opening of the Museum building on the National Mall in 1976. Still flush with the excitement of opening what would immediately become the worlds most popular museum, the curatorial staff was painfully aware of the space limitations placed upon future collecting. The size of the facility at Silver Hill, even after it was refurbished and renamed in Paul Garbers honor, was insufficient to permit future growth.

Barring expansion at the Garber Facility, it would soon be impossible to collect any new military or commercial aircraft, as the size of even the smallest of these aircraft would strain the Museums ability to house and protect them correctly. For years the Museum had compensated for the lack of space by cobbling together off-site storage solutions and placing pieces of the collection on loan. Some of the larger artifacts, such as the Boeing 307 Stratoliner and the Boeing 367-80, were stored in the Arizona desert. Other large aircraft, such as the Curtiss NC-4, the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic, were placed on loan to museums around the country. The Space Shuttle