A couple days ago, I came back from a vacation with my family to Seattle / Vancouver / Victoria. Victoria is a lovely city and I strongly recommend it as a holiday destination. While in Seattle, I toured the Boeing Factory at Everett and the Museum of Flight in Seattle. While at the Everett factory where they build B-747s along with the other big jumbos, I was struck by the fact that most of the components were not made by Boeing. For example, I believe(?) the wings for the B-747 are actually made by Northrup.

The Museum of Flight is fantastic. I hade the opportunity of walking through a Concorde, JFK's Air Force One and saw the original B-747. There was also an ex-Soviet Vostok type reentry vehicle that was extremely interesting (they used a funny type of carbon phenolic). There was an SR-71 there with a D-21 drone on its back. The leading edges of the SR-71 were odd (they were not titanium). It's possible the original titanium leading edges were pulled and replaced with museum dummies. My 8 year old son and I embarrassed ourselves in a 2 degree-of-freedom F-17 flight simulator. Orignally I was the gunner and my son was pilot-in-command. He kept playing the thing like it was a video game instead of an aircraft and we kept augering-in. I then selected myself as pilot with him as the gunner. He blasted everything in sight with missiles and the mini-gun. It's nice having an infinite amount of ammunition and being able to survive multiple high speed surface impacts.

Gary