Museum of Flight

Get you free museum tickets

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Between shutdowns, staff layoffs, and budget cuts, the pandemic has been tough on museums and cultural attractions across the United States.

But that won’t stop more than 1000 museums, zoos, and cultural centers from opening their doors for free on Saturday, September 18 as part of Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day 2021.

Each participating museum will offer free admission to guests who present a museum day ticket downloaded from the Museum Day site. Visitors may request one ticket per email and each ticket provides general admission to the ticket holder and one guest.

In addition to offering savings on admission fees, which can be quite hefty, Museum Day gives guests a chance to revisit a favorite museum or explore a new one.

The event, which was canceled last year due to COVID-19, celebrates the reopening of museums and the return of arts and cultural experiences with this year’s theme of Experience America.

You can search by city, zip code, or state for a museum near you. Here are a few examples of museums you might want to visit with your free Museum Day ticket – or any day.

Flight Path Museum & Learning Center at LAX

The Flight Path Museum and Learning Center is a great aviation and aerospace museum at Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX Flight Path Museum airplane models

Gold Coast Railroad Museum: Miami, FL

The museum houses more than 40 historic rail cars including the Presidential Rail Car ‘Ferdinand Magellan,’ and Florida East Coast Steam Locomotive #153. 

Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, NY

The legendary aircraft carrier Intrepid is a National Historic Landmark. See 28 aircraft, the space shuttle Enterprise, and enter Growler, the only guided missile submarine open to the public.

Museum of Flight, Seattle, WA

The Museum of Flight is the world’s largest independent air and space museum. It displays over 160 airplanes and spacecraft on a 23-acre campus. The museum’s six buildings include the original Boeing Aircraft factory.

Museum Monday: Aerospace Medicine at Seattle’s Museum of Flight

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Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day returns on September 18, 2021 and on that day more than 1000 museums, science centers, and gardens around the country will be offering free admission to anyone who shows up with a downloaded Museum Day ticket.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight (where regular admission is usually $25) is on the list this year and we’ve already downloaded our ticket so we can go see the museum’s newest exhibit called Stranger Than Fiction – the Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine.

The exhibit includes dozen of artifacts, including medical kits, airsickness bags, flight suits, and spacesuits. and tells the story of aviation and space adventurers, doctors, and researchers who make it possible for people to fly through the air and off into space.

Below are some of the retro comic book-style images the Museum of Flight is using to help make the exhibit accessible to all. And here is the official Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack, created by artist Leeni Ramadan.

(All photos courtesy Museum of Flight)

Museums are opening across the country

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Are you ready to visit a museum? If so, it’s a good bet you’ll find a museum near you that’s open, or getting to ready to open its doors to the (masked ) public again soon.

Here are some of the museums we’ve got on our list.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight

It was cute when animals from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo got to visit the Museum of Flight. But we were still jealous. Now we’re happy people can visit the museum too.

Can’t make it? Don’t worry. The museum’s collection can be viewed online. In the artifact section, we found this talking GI Joe Astronaut from 1970.
“When his dog tag is pulled, GI Joe narrates his way through a lunar mission, from liftoff to Moon landing to splashdown.”

Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum 

The Mütter Museum is a medical museum with far-ranging collections of anatomical specimens, models, and medical instruments. Einstein’s brain is here. And so is a specimen from John Wilkes Booth’s vertebra.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Memento Mütter, the museum’s online exhibit of more than 60 items from the Museum’s collection, about half of which are not on public display.  If you check it out, be warned that the paper mache eyeball is one of the least alarming objects you’ll see.

Now that the museum has reopened, there’s a new exhibit of photographs by Nikki Johnson, who got to go behind-the-scenes at the museum and create still-life photos of items that intrigued her.

Fashioning Art from Paper at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum

A new exhibit at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY features life-size costumes that look like fabric but are actually made from paper. Beginning in 1994, Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave started creating these incredible paper works. She ended up with four collections ranging from the fashion of Elizabeth I to 20th century Venice and tributes to famous artists like Picasso and Matisse. All four collections are part of this exhibit.

The museum made a video of the ‘unboxing’ of some of the dresses in the exhibit.

Museum of Flight and other museum openings

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When we’re not in airports, we’re in museums. And right now we’re waiting for the green light to do both.

Here are some of the museums and museums exhibitions on our list.

Museum of Flight – March 4

The Museum of Flight in Seattle will reopen on Thursday, March 4 through Sunday, March 7. After that, the museum will be open every Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. until further notice. Attendance will be limited to 25% capacity.

All five buildings on the 23-acre campus, including the open-air, 3-acre Aviation Pavilion will be available to visitors. Smaller galleries, some airplane cabins, and the flight simulators will be closed for COVID-19 safety. But the museum’s Air Force One, Boeing 747, and 787 Dreamliner will be open.

In the meantime, take advantage of the great virtual tours the Museum of Flight has created.

Louisville’s Unfiltered Truth Collection

The Unfiltered Truth Collection in Louisville, KY, launching in March 2012, will highlight the African American influence in Kentucky with a special focus on bourbon, horse racing industries, and Muhammad Ali.

Seven local attractions will be sharing new Black heritage experiences and historical perspectives. Two are already available. The Ideal Bartender Experience at Evan Williams celebrates the Black bartender who made the Old Fashioned famous in the first cocktail book, from 1917. The Kentucky Derby Museum’s new tour tells the story of the African Americans that once headlined the Thoroughbred racing scene.

Music for the Great Sun at Exhibit C Gallery

On March 1, Exhibit C, a Native American art gallery in Oklahoma City, OK owned by the Chickasaw Nation, debuts work by Native American glass artist Preston Singletary and Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman.

For his show, Music for the Great Sun, the two artists joined forces to create work inspired by ancient pieces that were originally made by the Cahokia Moundbuilders imperial craftsmen. The Great Sun was a divine god-king of the Cahokia Moundbuilders, and both the political and religious leader of this ancient class-stratified society.

Museum Monday: Where to see the Aerocar

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We enter the new week still grounded by COVID-19, but dreaming of places we might soon be able to go.

And the fun ways we might get there.

In the meantime, we put together a round-up of some aviation museum highlights to visit, virtually, for The Points Guy blog.

On the list, we were pleased to be able to include one of our all-time favorite aviation artifacts: the Aerocar, which is part of the collection at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

The museum recently posted a fun video of the museum curator describing the Taylor Aerocar III, which is one version of the flying car that Moulton Taylor built – and flew – in the 1950s.

Take a look at this 1949 news reel that shows the Aerocar taking flight.