It is currently being assembled at the Museum's airfield where it will be used as an operational tower. A two-story brick and concrete structure, it was completely disassembled, labeled and shipped to Virginia. Īlso underway is a control tower, a re-erection of a genuine ex-8th AAF World War II tower from RAF Goxhill. It was dismantled and shipped to Virginia Beach and construction started in 2010 and finished in fall of 2012 at the Museum where it now houses the Museum's Luftwaffe aircraft. The Luftwaffe hangar was built in 1934 at Cottbus Air Base after the base was closed during the reunification of Germany, the Museum obtained the hangar in 2004. The complex includes two display hangars (one on each side of the main museum building) in one group of buildings, and in another group, a replica World War I-era wooden hangar, a maintenance hangar (entirely new, but an exact replica of a 1937 Works Progress Administration design), a restored authentic pre-WWII Luftwaffe metal hangar, and a set of three identical storage hangars painted to resemble British World War II hangars. The museum is housed at its own small private grass airfield, the Virginia Beach Airport, in the Pungo area of Virginia Beach, Virginia. Since the sales in 2013, additional aircraft (including a projected replacement de Havilland Dragon Rapide) have been acquired and are under restoration to fly. Several aircraft were sold, see below, but both Yagen's businesses and the museum are now operating normally. may have to go to keep the operation aloft" and "'we are still open for business and business is normal'". However, the announced sale of the museum and aircraft was premature it was announced only a week later that "the museum won't close soon, some of the facility's planes. Īn article in The Virginian-Pilot reported that Yagen had said "I'm subsidizing it heavily every year and my business no longer allows me to do that financially, and therefore I don't have a solution for it". He was selling his vocational schools business, and no longer had the resources to finance the Museum. In June 2013 it was reported that the museum and its collection of planes was to be sold off, due to some financial difficulties which Yagen's business was then experiencing. He had been collecting and restoring warbirds since the mid-1990s, starting with a Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk, Difficulties in 2013 The Museum was founded by Gerald "Jerry" Yagen in 2005, and the museum's hangars were opened to the public in 2008.
The collection includes both a reference library, as well as artifacts and materials to illustrate the historic context of the aircraft in the collection.
The museum's work includes preservation and restoration of the aircraft, and it also conducts live demonstrations of the aircraft in the form of twice-yearly airshows. It includes examples from Germany, France, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, from both World War I and World War II, and its complete collection ranges from the 1910s to the early 1950s. The Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is home to one of the world's largest collections of warbirds in flying condition.
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