DD: Well, first of all, the downtown museum is big but the new museum is almost 3 times that size. There are no galleries in the new center, it's all open for the most part from end to end, so it's a huge, huge open hangar..but it's so enormous; I mean it's 10 stories tall and it's 3 and a half football fields long.

JS: That sounds like the Boeing factory.

DD: It's little bit smaller than that, but it's still pretty big.

JS: And how many aircraft will you eventually have in there?

DD: The plan now is to have over 200 airplanes and they vary in size from the little teeny Budweiser jet that they used in the James Bond movies all the way up to the B29 (Enola Gay, below). There's a possibility that once the SSTs are retired by British airways, we'll have one of those sitting out there.

JS: And you have the space shuttle..

DD: Yeah, we have the test launch, "Enterprise" version and the space hangar is under construction right now. All of the space artifacts are in what has been recently named the McDonnnell space hangar..and it's after the McDonnell corporation, I assume. But all that was just recently announced.

JS: This has to be a thrill..here you are today with all this under your charge..has to be a tremendous burden, but it has to be a great thrill.

DD: I say this once a day: "I'm the luckiest guy I know." It allows me to incorporate my experience from the military and my training as a historian into something that I really see as a public service and, in the long term, will be something that will help people in America understand the aviation end of this nation. It's a very impressive story to tell.

Right: Dik Daso and Wiley Post's "Winnie Mae."

JS: I've always said this industry is a prime economic and technology driver, and it is a big driver in foreign policy..was I lying?

DD: No. Clearly, there are certain areas not necessarily influencing foreign policy directly, but certainly indirectly. And we see this much more today as technology has evolved..particularly in the area of precision guided munitions. The way that we procure airplanes has changed a lot. We're much more concerned with being able to use precision in the application of airpower than we used to be because we didn't have the technology to do it. What we're really concerned with now is the application of precision force and that does influence what the political forces are able to do at the levels they work at. That'll continue to evolve. (But) just because we have precision weapons doesn't mean they're always the right tool to use. We saw in the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan that precision weapons were handy; they were useful in certain circumstances, but we still saw B52s doing area bombardment to rustle up the bad guys and get 'em to move or close their caves down or whatever we were doing..but it's still good to have a variety of all those, but certainly precision weapons are first choice of the politicos now.

JS: The Predator unmanned vehicle..

DD: I just met the chairman of General Atomics whose company built it ..recently the CIA was launching Hellfires off it against the Bad Guys so there is a new step. Picture: Predator. Photo courtesy USAF. You remember your (1995) interview with Ron Fogelman (former USAF Chief of Staff) who said the last buy of the F16 is gonna be unmanned. Well, that never happened, but look where we are; we don't have to buy an F16 now, we can buy Predators and Global Hawks and other types of unmanned vehicles that are specifically designed as UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) and that's certainly a trending thing. You're gonna see more of that; the less people get in harm's way, the better the American public likes it.

JS: What happens to this place?

DD: The Garber area will remain Smithsonian property. As of this date, we do not have the funding for the restoration facility out at HAZY, so this will still remain the restoration facility until that facility is built; I'd say for the next 3 to 5 years, this will do exactly what it does now except there'll be a lot more moving of airplanes done from point A to point B.

JS: Servicing both facilities..

DD: Well, sure. I think what we'll start to see is there'll be a little more time to spend on the downtown museum after HAZY is finished..some of the curators are concerned that things are becoming outdated downtown (Washington) and need to be refurbished and updated and we do not have the time, staff or money to do that with HAZY on the horizon. But soon after that I think we'll see some more innovation and some creative types of exhibits starting downtown.

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