We went to the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace, or Air and Space Museum, at the recommendation of a…read morefriend who works for Delta Airlines and spends a lot of her time among planes. We have two young boys and this seemed like a perfect family outing when we were in Paris earlier this month. Our experience was slightly tainted by an uncharacteristic tantrum from our six-year-old, but the museum was otherwise wonderful.
It was maybe a mistake to schedule this visit for our first morning in Paris, when everyone was tired and out of sorts. The museum, located on the grounds of an airport long closed to commercial aviation, is a bit of a hike from Paris. We got a much later start than intended, took the train out to Porte de la Chapelle and suffered a hot half-hour wait for the first bus that would take us to the museum. Enough to make even a reasonable adult feel irritable.
The museum was pretty amazing, though, well worth visiting, especially with kids who love airplanes. It wasn't busy at all on a Thursday in July. No wait and no advance reservation required. We spent over two hours exploring and would've stayed longer if we didn't have to get back to Paris. There were definitely a couple exhibit halls we rushed through for time, and others we missed altogether.
The Concorde hall, with two retired Concorde jets, was the highlight for us adults, but I think the boys loved everything. Our three-year-old is obsessed with "airplanes with propellers" and both kids enjoyed all the old airplanes and the hall full of helicopters. The tarmac was awesome and featured several planes in their full glory. We got to go inside a Boeing 747, a plane we've read about several times in one of the boys' favorite picture books. The space stuff was cool, too, and we would've spent more time looking at it if we hadn't had to get going.
In retrospect, we should have skipped the gift shop, where our older kid had his meltdown because I wanted to buy him the die-cast Concorde jet instead of the generic made-in-China airplane I recognized from a toy store back home. It was a nice shop, though, with a lot of attractive plane models and other memorabilia that must appeal to adult enthusiasts.
If you're child-free with limited time in Paris, you're probably not making it out to the Air and Space Museum. It's an excellent outing, though, for anyone who wants to walk inside a 747 and two Concorde jets.