Hagerstown Aviation Museum

Hagerstown Aviation Museum occupies the former Fairchild Aircraft flight test hangar at Hagerstown Regional Airport, turning an industrial workspace into a study collection for one of America’s notable mid-20th-century manufacturers. The museum concentrates on the history of Fairchild Aircraft Corporation, whose transport and utility designs once rolled out of Hagerstown and onto global flight lines. Preservation here is as much about context as hardware: aircraft such as the Fairchild C-82 Packet and later Fairchild transports, acquired through community fundraising and careful salvage, are kept in the kind of environment in which they were originally tested and evaluated. The move into the historic hangar in 2020, and its subsequent purchase, secured a rare surviving piece of aviation infrastructure, allowing visitors to examine not only airframes but also the scale and layout of a working test facility. For military aviation enthusiasts, the site illustrates how a regional manufacturer contributed to cargo and support aviation, and how volunteer-driven preservation can keep both aircraft and industrial heritage intact within an active airfield setting.