When it opens in December of 2003, the Smithsonian's new Dulles facility will house an astounding collection of aircraft, many of them much too large to ever been shown in the main museum building on the capitol mall. They include the B-29 atomic bomber, Enola Gay; the space shuttle Enterprise; an SR 71 Blackbird, and a Lockheed Constellation.
I recently visited the Smithsonian's Paul Garber maintenance and restoration facility in Silver Hill, MD with an old friend, Dik Daso. Dr. Daso is the Smithsonian's Curator for Modern Military Aircraft. A historian, he retired recently from the USAF with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In other words, Dik Daso knows his onions, airplane-wise, so he's leading the effort to pack up and move the first 70 or so airplanes to Dulles next spring.
The following is an interview done while we toured the shops and storage hangars at Garber:

DD: For our guys here, primarily, their job is to restore and preserve the artifacts that we have in our national collection. And that goes from archival artifacts, photographs, all the way up to huge airplanes like this MIG 21 here ..and there is a broad range of talents here. There are some of the most unique, technically skilled folks here that do this work. There are welders, (there are) woodworkers modeling a WW1 propeller blade. They're on salary, a lot of them are, but we have a lot of volunteers, too, that just love to work on it..some of them have direct experience with some of the airplanes as well..some of the Naval airplanes that we've restored have been restored by people who either flew them or were mechanics on them. It helps with the accuracy and taking apart and putting together all the airplanes.

JS: Is your job still the military?

DD: Yeah, I'm the curator for modern military aircraft. That's exactly what I do and that econcompasses all the airplanes from WW2 up to the present day except for German and Russian airplanes; those have different curators.

JS: There still must be a lotta surprises as these airplanes come apart.

DD: We had a couple of them that actually had battle damage from sitting here in Silver Hill; we had one with a bullet hole from the bar back behind here that went through the wall and into the airplane, so I think that's a pretty funny story. But I think some of the paint schemes and some of the archeology that we do on the airplanes is some of the most interesting; like the paint scheme for the Heinkel 219..finding out what it was really painted as the Germans intended to use it was interesting. For this MIG, you literally have to take it apart to find out more about the configuration internally so you can actually narrow down when and where it was built and where it might have served. This particular airplane is a captured airplane so its provenance is not released and may not even be available, we're not really sure. But we do know from taking it apart and investigating the status or the kind of fuel tanks that it had that were made in a certain place at a certain time so we do know those kinda things about it. And we do know that it was Russian built, so by digging into that literally..archeology on the airplane is how you find those things.

JS: How many do you have to deal with before the museum transfer is made?

DD: Well, the plan for the first year is pretty much complete. The first 70 or so airplanes that will be there on opening day are preserved and restored and waiting transportation (see below). So, we are about on the timeline to have complete the airplanes that are gonna be there when we open. This is an on-going process..it's gonna take about through 2007 to get the (planned) 212 airplanes into that museum, hung and displayed. So for opening day, we're gonna have between 70 and 80 with other artifacts in display cases as well.

JS: The museum downtown is so big and there's so much in it, it's just mind-boggling to think so much more is stored here and in other places around the country and you're not gonna disturb the collection downtown.

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