As we wrote earlier, the Miracle on the Hudson plane is up for auction, and though it may ultimately get sold for scrap or snatched up by a wealthy industrialist who stages fake plane crashes, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum seems like the best home for it. After all, we’re talking about one of the most celebrated near-disasters in the annals of human flight. But the museum won’t, in fact, be bidding on the Miracle plane. It’s nothing personal, though they don’t bid on anything.
“We don’t buy artifacts, and we can’t comment unless it’s offered to us,” a spokesman told us today. Even if someone did decide to purchase the plane and donate it to the Smithsonian, a collections committee would then have to explore the plane’s “historical significance” and determine whether it could physically fit it into the museum’s “storage or conservation area” before accepting it, the spokesman says. So, who’s going to step up to the plate for the Smithsonian? If only New York had a prominent billionaire philanthropist with a well-documented appreciation for the events of that day. If only.
