MAPS Air Museum is a “working” Museum. What does that mean? Many of the aircraft that MAPS receives are dilapidated and need a lot of restoration work. Due to that, this means many volunteer hours are not just going toward general maintenance/upkeep on aircraft, but also on continuous work to refurbish these aircraft to museum status.
The aircraft under refurbishment at MAPS are at varying stages of repair or maintenance. Anywhere from a completed aircraft that needs basic general maintenance, all the way down to extremely deteriorated aircraft that are dismantled to its base fuselage for work to be done. When one is complete, MAPS finds more aircraft to refurbish before they deteriorate too much. Many are rare to find and/or heavily deteriorated.
As an example, our B-26 Marauder of the WWII era required more than 13,500 volunteer worker-hours to repair. This aircraft crash landed in early 1942, in British Columbia, Canada and stayed there for a long time before anyone attempted to revive this rare aircraft. This aircraft at MAPS is only 1 of 4 fully refurbished aircraft on display in the world (only 1 of which is flyable) and another 3 at various degrees of repair.
Here you will find a listing of the types of aircraft, mostly military, that are in various stages of refurbishment or maintenance. A few aircraft are in our restricted Restoration building for heavy repairs. While many others are awaiting their turn to be fully restored, you can still see many of these aircraft on display at MAPS.
MAPS Air Museum attains their aircraft through purchases, but also through indefinite loan agreements from many entities, such as: private collections, the M.A.R.C group, McKinley Museum and the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. Below the list of aircraft are the Before/After photos from how the aircraft arrived at MAPS and what they look like after their renovations at MAPS!
Click HERE to see what else is being renovated with our facility projects!