The Leonardo museum in Salt Lake City is tearing down its walls to make room for a new permanent exhibit.
The new exhibit called Flight is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s obsession with flight.
It will feature all sorts of aircraft from missiles to planes to jet packs. The museum is trying to figure out how to get its main attraction, a huge C-131 airplane, through the front door.
“And you can see it just fits inside,” says Mark Hofeling the Creative Director of the exhibit.
He and a museum team will be taking the plane in by bits and pieces. They’re still trying to figure out how to get the biggest piece in.
“So that’s called the spar, which is like the shoulders of the plane, it’s kind of the critical architecture," he says. "And we don’t want to cut it any smaller because we don’t want to compromise that strength.”
The new exhibit will be very interactive. The public will be able to roam inside the C-131, sit in the pilot’s chair, and play with the controls.
Andrew Parker is the Chief Marketing Officer at The Leonardo.
“That’s really kind of the main focus of the exhibit. There’s some hyper-realistic flight simulations that we’ll do. There’s a bunch of interactives that we have, where you can go in," he says.
"These aren’t the kind of interactives where you press a button and something reads something to you," he says. "These are the kinds of things where you go in and look, and we want you to kind of break things apart, figure it out, understand how stuff works so you really understand the goal and the science behind flight.”
The exhibit opens August 6th. The Leonardo is taking donations to the exhibit on its website in exchange for discounted tickets.
