Hangar 25 Air Museum

Hangar 25 Air Museum occupies part of the former Webb Air Force Base at Big Spring, a field whose concrete and ramp spaces once supported intense pilot and bombardier training cycles. The surrounding airport traces its lineage to Big Spring Army Air Field, opened in 1942 as one of the Army Air Forces’ West Texas bombardier schools, then reactivated during the Korean War as Big Spring Air Force Base and later renamed in honor of 1st Lt. James L. Webb. From the early 1950s until closure in 1977, the base functioned as a major Air Training Command installation, where thousands of Air Force pilots progressed through aircraft such as the T-28 Trojan and T-33 Shooting Star. Within this context, Hangar 25 serves as a preserved fragment of a much larger Cold War training ecosystem, anchoring the memory of routine sortie generation, technical maintenance work, and the disciplined throughput of aviation cadets. Its isolated West Texas setting underscores the logic of dispersing training infrastructure across wide, open airspace and highlights ongoing efforts to retain physical evidence of that era’s flight training architecture and culture.