The National Airline History Museum continues to make progress in every aspect of operations.  As this happens, each step forward becomes more noticeable and the next steps for the museum are no different.

As the organizational structure and finances of the museum have improved over the last eight months, the museum has moved forward at lightning speed in terms of its progress of organizing and improving the museum, inventory, proper accession of artifacts and the progress of moving our aircraft back to flying condition.

This progress has now moved the museum into an area that allows us to advance further, but the movement will now be much more visible to the public and much less behind the scenes than it has been up to this point.  Now that the museum’s foundation is much more solid, it is time to start renovating the rest of the operation, literally. 

The first major change the public may notice is the change in our aircraft maintenance operations.  We are now moving closer and closer to more than one of our aircraft being ready for flight.  To that end, we have to make sure that our paperwork is caught up with our physical work.  This means we need to alter our work on the aircraft briefly to do proper inspections on work that has been completed.  The museum needs to work with the FAA on our maintenance and inspection programs to ensure our aircraft are safe and then develop flight training requirements for our crews.   If you are around the museum, you will see more inspection type work on the aircraft than maintenance work. We are also using this time to upgrade the hangar area, make the work areas more educational for our guests and to clean up and fix much of our ground support equipment.

The next step in moving forward is our museum area.  For the first time since the museum was moved to Hangar 9, we will be renovating our actual museum to make it more informative and user friendly.  The exhibits will be displayed in a manner that is more educational and easier for all of our patrons to view.  We have a number of exhibits that have been in storage that we plan to bring out and display.  The design and layout of the displays will change to optimize both the space available and to adequately preserve the artifacts so they are available for viewing by future generations.

Other changes will begin after Labor Day.  At that time we will begin the refurbishment of our museum area.  This will mean that we will be forced to limit our tours to the general public.  We will still have group and member tours by appointment and we will still be having all of our events, including our popular hangar dances.

We are excited to be moving into this next phase of improvements to the National Airline History Museum.  We are actually 12 months ahead of the originally projected timeline for these improvements and we are grateful for all the support from the members of the public, community and sponsors who have supported the National Airline History Museum during this last year. 

Please follow the National Airline History Museum on our website at www.airlinehistory.organd on Facebook for updates.