Sean P. Means: Looking at Leonardo’s pre-‘Flight’ preparations

It sounds like a question the Bridge Keeper in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" would ask: What is the wingspan of a C-131 aircraft?

The answer is 105 feet, and that information is quite useful to the people at The Leonardo, Salt Lake City's science-and-technology museum in Library Square.

The C-131, a military transport made in the 1950s, is one of two airplanes The Leonardo now owns, and it will be incorporated in a major new exhibit, "Flight," now in the development stage.

The C-131 and a MiG-21, a Soviet fighter jet from the late '50s that was donated to the museum, will be suspended from the ceiling of the Leonardo's 10,000-square-foot first-floor special exhibits gallery, the museum's largest space.

"We wanted to create an exhibit that spoke to the amazingness of flight," said Marissa de Simone, the museum's exhibits director, who is spearheading "Flight" — the first blockbuster exhibit The Leonardo has developed in-house.

The blockbusters that have shown at The Leonardo have been touring shows, such as "The Dead Sea Scrolls," "Mummies of the World" and "Body Worlds." Andrew Parker, the museum's chief marketing officer, said The Leonardo's staff has been taking notes "to learn what it takes to make an exhibit on that scale."

It takes a lot of room. De Simone said the C-131, wingtip to wingtip, will stretch from the museum's north wall to its south wall. The plane, acquired from a junkyard in Arizona and now housed in a South Salt Lake City warehouse, is so big that the museum will remove part of its outer wall on the north side, facing the City Library, to install a garage door.

(Reinstalling doors isn't unheard of for local museums. Before the Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened its "Speed" exhibit in 2012, it put in wider service doors in the John and Marcia Price Museum Building to accommodate the exhibit's classic racing cars.)

Among the elements of the exhibit de Simone and her colleagues are creating for "Flight":

• A "Tunnel of Dreams" to highlight the inspirations for human beings wanting to fly, from before Leonardo through the Space Age and beyond. It culminates in a replica of a late-1960s suburban living room, with the TV tuned in on the day — July 20, 1969 — when the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the moon.

• Ramps leading up to and over the C-131, so museumgoers can walk inside the plane and even on the wing and get a closer look at the MiG.

• Interactive kiosks that explain the technology of the three major forms of flight — buoyant (balloons and zeppelins), aerodynamic (planes and winged things) and ballistic (rockets and missiles). These won't be simple exhibits, Parker said, "where you just push a button. … We want to force you to think about what you're looking at, and play with it, break it down, figure it out."

Parker and de Simone stressed the involvement of the Utah community to create the exhibit.

De Simone said The Leonardo's research team is consulting with Utah aerospace firms, universities and hobby groups. "They've been informing our content work, on top of the work of our research team," de Simone said.

Also, Parker said, The Leonardo has launched its first major crowd-funding campaign, via IndieGoGo.com's nonprofit division Generosity, to raise $100,000. Benefits for backers range from a discount ticket for the exhibit (for $5) to admission to a dinner event with former Utah Sen. Jake Garn, a longtime military pilot who flew on a space-shuttle mission in 1985 (for $500).

In addition to bringing in more development money, the crowd-funding campaign raises the stakes for museum patrons, Parker said. "When people come into the exhibit, we want them to feel like they own a little bit of it," he said.

The "Flight" exhibit will open sometime in late summer. (Organizers aren't announcing an exact date yet, to give themselves a little wiggle room.) Once it opens, Parker said the museum aims to keep it in place for a few years.

Flight, de Simone said, "was a topic that our namesake, Leonard da Vinci, was very passionate about, very interested in. It's a topic that sits at an intersection of design and science and technology and engineering — and here at The Leo, that's the kind of content we like to cover."

I just hope "Flight" can answer an aviation question that has baffled humanity for a millennium: Just what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.