The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum will open Modern Military Aviation on Nov. 11, bringing more than 150 aviation artifacts into one gallery that spans almost 80 years, including the Gulf War era. Michael Hankins, the curator behind the display, said the room is built around the people who made the machines and the choices that shaped them.
“We’re covering almost 80 years of history in this room, which is a challenge to do,” Hankins said. The gallery opens on Veterans Day and uses aircraft, cameras and wreckage to trace how military aviation moved from World War II to 9/11 and beyond.
Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
Hankins said, “everything in here was designed by people making choices,” and that visitors should be able to see “why some were made or not made, and how these things evolved over time through the lens of the people behind them.” The exhibit includes an MQ-1 Predator drone, which sits near a fragment from one of the two commercial airliners hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
That placement ties the display to a specific military and political shift. Three MQ-1 Predator drones were weaponized and sent into combat operations in Afghanistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and Hankins said the gallery helps connect America’s geopolitical force posture to how the United States interacts globally.
World Trade Center fragment
The World Trade Center fragment brings a preservation problem into the middle of the exhibit. The museum said the metal has damage and requires ongoing conservation work, and Hankins said, “There are a lot of unique preservation concerns because, you know, it looks somewhat distressed, as you can imagine, and there’s a lot of damage to the metal in there.”
He added that the conservation department must keep it from degrading further without changing it too much. “We really felt strongly that we should include it because it’s hard to think of a more historically significant event,” he said of Sept. 11, 2001.
Cold War to Afghanistan
The gallery also reaches back to the Cold War through the Hycon B camera, which was carried by a Lockheed U-2 and captured definitive images of Soviet nuclear missile sites. Those images contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and visitors can scan through them as part of the exhibit.
Another object, a UH-1H Huey, saw multiple tours of combat in Vietnam. Together with the B-29, P-51, MQ-1 Predator, and the World Trade Center fragment, the gallery offers a direct route through military aviation history without flattening the differences between World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the aftermath of 9/11.
For visitors, the change is simple: on Nov. 11, a new gallery opens with objects that let the museum tell a longer military aviation story in one room. Hankins put the point plainly: “The aviation technology that was developed over those 80 years is what lets America project power globally across the world.”
