Just south of Seattle, you can crawl into a NASA cockpit at the world’s biggest air museum

Boeing Field’s best-kept not-so-secret

Just south of Seattle, at the edge of an active airport runway, sits the largest independent, nonprofit air and space museum in the world. Fifteen acres.

Over 175 aircraft and spacecraft. A wooden barn where Boeing built its first planes in 1916.

A Concorde you can walk through. A NASA Space Shuttle trainer where you can crawl into the cockpit.

You won’t run out of things to see in three hours, but you’ll want four.

How a 1929 biplane in Alaska started all of this

It began in 1965, when a group of aviation enthusiasts set out to recover a 1929 Boeing 80A-1 biplane sitting in Anchorage, Alaska.

They called themselves the Pacific Northwest Aviation Historical Foundation, and their goal was to keep history from disappearing. Three years later, the museum had a name and a rented space at Seattle Center.

Today, it covers 15 acres at Boeing Field and draws visitors from across the country. That Alaska biplane started something much bigger than anyone expected.

Walk through the barn where Boeing first built planes

The Red Barn is where it all started. William Boeing converted this two-story wooden structure into his first manufacturing plant in 1916, and the building itself has a story before that.

Edward Heath built it in 1909 as a shipyard on the Duwamish River.

The museum bought it from the Port of Seattle for one dollar, then barged it upriver to its current location.

Inside, you can see restored workstations, original drafting rooms, and the office of early chief engineer Claire Egtvedt.

The Great Gallery hangs history from the ceiling

The T.A. Wilson Great Gallery opened in 1987, and walking in for the first time stops you cold.

Dozens of historic aircraft hang overhead in a glass-walled hall that tracks the first century of flight from one end to the other.

The centerpiece on the floor is an M-21 Blackbird, built in 1963 and the only surviving example of its kind. It’s a two-seat variant of the A-12, built for a CIA program that launched drones in flight.

One aircraft. A lot of history behind it.

Get into the cockpit of the world’s fastest jet

The SR-71 Blackbird flew above 85,000 feet and hit speeds over 2,100 mph, and at this museum, you can sit in one. The Cockpits exhibit lets you climb into a real SR-71A cockpit and handle the controls.

The museum is believed to be the only place in the world where the public can do that. You can also drop into a full-scale mock-up of an F/A-18L Hornet fighter cockpit.

These aren’t behind ropes. You actually get in.

Two floors of WWI and WWII fighters, nose to tail

The J. Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing opened on June 6, 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

At 88,000 square feet, it holds 28 restored fighters across two floors, with World War I aviation on the upper level and World War II aircraft filling the ground floor.

The Champlin Fighter Collection, which moved here after its Arizona museum closed in 2003, is internationally recognized.

You’ll also find over 400 scale models built by Dr. Logan Holtgrewe and a 13.5-foot model Zeppelin.

Walk through a Concorde, Air Force One and the first 747

The Aviation Pavilion covers three acres of open-air, covered space and puts you inside planes you’d only see from a runway fence anywhere else.

Four aircraft are open for walkthroughs: the first jet, Air Force One, a British Airways Concorde, the original Boeing 747 named City of Everett, and the third Boeing 787 Dreamliner ever built.

The Concorde here, registration G-BOAG, is one of only four displayed outside of Europe. You walk through all of them at your own pace.

Air Force One carried presidents for nearly 40 years

This specific plane flew in the presidential fleet from 1959 to 1996. Eisenhower flew on it.

Nixon did too. Every president has used it at some point.

When you walk down the aisle, you’re moving through the same cabin where decisions got made at 35,000 feet for nearly four decades.

The Aviation Pavilion also holds a FedEx Air Cargo exhibit built from the actual fuselage of a former Boeing 727 freighter, so the scale of what cargo planes carry starts to make sense.

Crawl inside NASA’s Space Shuttle trainer

The Charles Simonyi Space Gallery holds NASA’s Full Fuselage Trainer, a full-scale mockup of the Space Shuttle orbiter built at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in the 1970s.

Every Space Shuttle astronaut trained in it before their missions. The wings are missing, but everything else is there.

The trainer flew to Seattle inside NASA’s Super Guppy cargo plane in 2013 and has been on exhibit since. Standing next to it, you get a sense of how small the actual crew spaces were inside.

Book a crew compartment tour while spots last

The museum runs the world’s only public crew compartment tours inside the Full Fuselage Trainer. The one-hour experience takes you into the lower mid-deck living area and up to the flight deck.

Tours run on the third weekend of each month, and only six people get in per session. You need to be at least 12 years old and comfortable on ladders in tight spaces.

Spots go fast, so check the schedule before you plan your trip around it.

Fly a simulator and watch real planes land outside

Beyond the aircraft, the museum keeps you busy. Flight simulators let you try to land a plane yourself.

An interactive Air Traffic Control tower exhibit looks out over the active Boeing Field runways, so you watch real aircraft move while you learn how controllers manage them.

A children’s play area sits in the Side Gallery next to the Great Gallery. The museum also runs aviation summer camps and a Challenger Learning Center.

In late April 2026, a new exhibit opens, tracing 100 years of flight attendant uniforms.

Free parking and free admission one night a month

The museum opens daily at 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m. On the first Thursday of every month, admission is free from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., which is worth planning around. Parking is always free.

You can get there from Interstate 5 at Exit 158, between downtown Seattle and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Budget three to four hours for the main galleries and aircraft, but if you book a shuttle trainer tour or spend time in the simulators, add another hour at least.

Visit the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington

At 9404 East Marginal Way South in Tukwila, just outside Seattle, the Museum of Flight is open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free on the first Thursday of each month from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., and parking is always free.

If you want to book a Space Shuttle crew compartment tour, check the official website ahead of time since the six-person sessions fill up quickly.

The museum also runs a restoration facility at Paine Field in Everett with dozens of ongoing projects.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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