Maine Air Museum

The Maine Air Museum occupies a Cold War artifact in its own right: Building 98 at Bangor International Airport, a 1958 concrete structure with walls over three meters thick, originally built for assembling air-to-air missiles when the field operated as Dow Air Force Base. That hardened architecture frames a collection and research space devoted to aviation as it unfolded in Maine and beyond. Created by the Maine Aviation Historical Society, which first formed in 1967 and reorganized in 1990, the museum reflects decades of grassroots documentation of local airfields, units, and civilian and military operations. Exhibits have addressed subjects such as aerial navigation in the Second World War and aerial firefighting during Maine’s catastrophic 1947 forest fires, tying global technologies to regional crises. Material on military crash sites and vanished aircraft underscores the risks inherent in both training and operational flying. From the story of early transatlantic flight—the museum holds components from the NC-4, the first airplane to cross the Atlantic—to the rotating beacon once used at Bangor itself, the site functions as both archive and field station for studying how aviation infrastructure, doctrine, and technology were implemented in the northeastern United States.