aircraft museum links

Aircraft and Military Museum Website Links

Links which are in italics take you to pages on my website, all others take you to pages on outside websites.

You can find links to web pages about particular military aircraft on the Aircraft Links page.

General

The Air Affair	The notes on this website say that it was last updated in 1998, nevertheless it contains a lot of still useful information, including a page listing aviation museums of the world and a very long aviation website links page.
Zeno's Warbirds	This site has an excellent list of links to WW 2 aircraft websites around the world.

Japan

Yasukuni-jinja

Yasukuni-jinja is a shinto shrine within walking distance of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Attached to the shrine is the Yushukan, or War Memorial Museum which documents several of Japan's wars in the 1800s and 1900s. There's an interesting collection of artifacts, including the first locomotive to traverse the Thai-Burma railway (made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai), a WW2 tank and Suisei dive bomber, and an extraordinary collection of kamikaze paraphenalia, including an Ohka rocket-powered kamikaze plane, and a Kaiten kamikaze submarine. The English version of this website, however, gives only a little information about the museum and its exhibits.

New Zealand

Classic Wings Down Under

This website is associated with a magazine which covers the warbird scene in Australia and New Zealand.

United Kingdom

Imperial War Museum Duxford facility	The Imperial War Museum's facility at Duxford houses most of the museum's military aircraft, and is also the site of the American Air Museum, which commemorates the United States involvement in the European Theater of world war two. Duxford is also the venue for three or four airshows each year.
Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon	The website is very nicely done, and the long list of aircraft on exhibit is enough to make any aircraft enthusiast's tongue hang out! Not only do they have the most well-known British aircraft of world war two and after, but they have very rare German and Japanese world war two aircraft. Last visited in January of 2008.
National Museum of Science and Industry	This large museum in London now seems to go by the name "the science museum", rather than its previous long-winded name. It's a general museum of science and technology, but has a small but interesting collection of historic aircraft, including the Supermarine floatplane racer which became the spitfire fighter, an Me163 Komett, a V1 "doodlebug" flying bomb and the Gloster E28/39, the first Allied jet plane to fly.
Fleet Air Arm Museum	The Fleet Air Arm Museum is the Royal Navy's aviation museum located about 125 miles west of London, near Yeovil, which is somewhat off the beaten track. The webmaster seems to believe that all web surfers are still using 640 x 480 screens, so the website's painful to navigate, but the rarely seen aircraft exhibited here (including a Concorde, though I don't remember them flying from aircraft carriers!) make the museum very worthwhile.
Spitfire and Hurricane Memorial	The Spitfire and Hurricane Memorial is located on the RAF air base in Ramsgate, Kent - just about as far east as you can go before hitting France! The memorial has a restored spitfire and a restored hurricane on display, both of which served in world war two. There's also quite a good website links page, slanted towards spitfires and hurricanes but also with other aviation websites.

USA

United States Air Force Museum at Dayton	The website of the official USAF museum at Dayton, Ohio, is well laid out, and full of excellent information not only about the aircraft which are exhibited in the museum, but of all the aircraft types which have flown with the USAF in its various incarnations.
Hiller Aviation Museum	The Hiller Aviation Museum in San Francisco is largely devoted to the revolutionary helicopters of the Hiller helicopter company, but also has general aviation exhibits, including the mockup of the Boeing supersonic transport (SST) which was meant to rival the Concorde.
Mid-Atlantic Air Museum	I never visited this museum in Pennsylvania, but it could be worth making a stop for if I'm ever in that area. The display hangars have a Hawker Hunter, F-86 Sabre, F-84 Thunderjet, B-25, P-2 Neptune and P-61 Black Widow, currently under restoration.
National D-Day Museum	The National D-Day Museum is located in New Orleans and has exhibits documenting not only the D-Day landings in Normandy, but also the amphibious assaults of the Pacific War.
National Naval Aviation Museum	This is the navy equivalent of the air force museum in Dayton. Located in Pensacola, Florida, I haven't had an opportunity to visit it, but I'd certainly like to. It's a large museum and there's a huge list of the aircraft that they've got, unfortunately it's arranged so that each letter of the alphabet has a separate page, making it slow and painful to move through the list. Last visited in April of 2008.
National Warplane Museum	This museum in upstate New York does have a worthwhile collection of aircraft, but the name is definitely over-ambitious. The aircraft range from early American jets like the F9F Panther to the rarely seen American version of the British Canberra bomber, this time in its reconnaisance role.
Nellis Air Force Base Threat Training Facility	The Threat Training Facility at Nellis AFB is a research facility whose very existence was classified until 1993. This two page official Nellis AFB description of the facility is very brief and is interesting mainly for the list of equipment, each of which has a photo but no accompanying text. Last visited in February of 2005.
Smithsonian Air And Space Museum	Along with the USAF Museum in Ohio, this is America's premier aircraft museum with 356 aircraft in the collection, many of them unique. The museum's main facility is on The Mall in Washington DC, however only a small fraction of the museum's aircraft is on display at any one time. In addition to this main building, the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility houses a large number of the collection's aircraft, around 140 of which can be viewed on public tours. Ultimately, many of the museum's aircraft will be displayed at the Udvar-Hazy Center, due to open in December 2003 at Dulles Airport outside Washington DC. The aircraft collections are incomparable, but the website is poorly designed, hence the three stars.
Virginia Air and Space Center	The Virginia Air and Space Center in Norfolk, Virginia has a good selection of American military aircraft and space craft , as well as an IMAX theater which shows movies on all sorts of subjects - just the ticket to keep the non technologists in the family happy!
USS Bowfin submarine museum	The USS Bowfin is a World War Two submarine which forms the core of the USS Bowfin Pacific Submarine Museum at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. There are plenty of other exhibits, including American torpedoes and submarine-borne missiles, with nuclear armed examples of both. There is an inside museum with memorabilia and more outside exhibits including a Japanese Kaiten kamikaze submarine.
USS Missouri	The USS Missouri is the battleship on which Japan surrendered, ending World War Two. Appropriately enough, it's now moored where the war in the Pacific began, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The website contains plenty of information about the ship and how to visit, and there's even a Japanese language version of it!
Aviation Museums of the USA	A list of links to US aviation museums, listed by state, which was last updated in 1998. Last visited in January of 2008.