Udvar-Hazy Center

Georgina Hunter-Jones

Part of the Smithsonian Institute, it is named after its major donor Steven Udvar-Hazy from Hungary.

The Steven Udvar-Hazy Center opened, in December 2003, to take all the excess aircraft and aviation memorabilia which could no longer fit in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. (The Simsonian itself has been collecting since 1876, when the Chinese Imperial Commission donated a selection of kites). The centre is named after its major donor Steven Udvar-Hazy, one of Forbes Magazine's world's richest people.

Udvar-Hazy fled Hungary for New York in 1958 at age 13. He studied economics at UCLA, and became avid flyer. Along with Louis Gonda, and his father Leslie, Udvar-Hazy started International Lease Finance Corporation with $150,000 and a $1.7 million bank loan. In 1990 they were bought by insurance giant AIG for stock. Rising AIG shares have since made all three billionaires. Udvar-Hazy donated $60 million to Smithsonian to build the Udvar-Hazy Centre at Virginia's Dulles Airport.

One of the features of the Udvar-Hazy is a very extensive gyrocopter section which, combined with the helicopter section, shows the amount of experimentation and invention that was taking place in the early days of 'straight-up' flight. This section includes the 1936 AC-35 Autogiro, with which the Department of Commerce...