I followed a trip to the Bourget Museum of Air and Space in Paris last Friday. This trip was organized by school only for students who do aeronautics, sorry for those doing automotive and railway transport.
Since this year's 2nd semester, we have started a class called technologies of aeronautics and one of the 1st things we've seen was history of aeronautics. So basically we have already seen most of the exposed items in the museum in the class, but this visit allowed us to have a really close look on everything we have learned.
Behind of me is a Boeing 747, it's one of the first jumbo civil aircrafts back in the 70's until now. The inside of this plane is modified and we can see the structure of the 747. It was just too bad that the A380, which is today's largest civil aircraft by Airbus, was not exposed in the museum, cause it's new. But the Americans were able to build this back in the 60's, salute.
Here you see some earlier french fighter aircrafts. The one with a big air inlet(the large hole) at the bottom is a Griffon II equipped with a ramjet (statoréacteur), it has broken the world record to achieve the speed of Mach 1.85 in 1957!
A "helicopter" with 4 propellers using an air balloon for the stability.
This thing actually flies!!!
Here are some replicas of the earliest aircrafts, even though some of them failed, but it's amazing to see how people in the past tried to fly in the sky. The flying ship at the front has a pair of wing like birds, while the one at the back if you can see has wings like a bat.
This is another interesting one, cause it uses the principe of bird's feathers.
Everyone knows the Wright brothers and everyone knows that they're Americans. But do you know that they actually acheived their success in France? Their 1st success in America was not appreciated by the authorities, and so they came to France and made another plane, which has successfully taken off. And from here onwards they get their fame to be the inventors of airplane. This is the replica of the plane which give them such a fame in France.
And of course how can you forget this magnificent concorde. The Bourget mesuem is the only place where you can see 2 concorde side by side in the world. I think you cant see the other one beside. It's a supersonic civil airliner. How fast it is? It can make a journey from Paris to New York in 3 hrs, which normally take 8 hrs! But it has been ceased from service 24 Oct 2003, after the an accident and several world problems.
This visit was definitely an extraordinary one, even though the journey to and back from Paris was a little bit time consuming and tiring. Now I just wanna sing "I BELIEVE I CAN FLY"...