NorthAmericaEight to cross the Atlantic for

A delta-shaped hangar on the edge of Hamilton's airport, about an hour's drive from Toronto, that holds Canada's great flying collection. Most of its 45 or so aircraft are Canadian service types: yellow BCATP trainers, Cold War jets, and maritime aeroplanes from both coasts. The difference here is that a good many of them still fly. The centrepiece is Lancaster B.X FM213, one of only two airworthy Lancasters in the world and, by the museum's own account, the only one you can buy a seat in. Around it stand a flying Firefly, B-25, Canso and Dakota, a Castle Bromwich Spitfire, and a restoration floor where the work can be watched in progress. For a British visitor it is the other half of the Commonwealth air-training story, kept in working order by volunteers. It deserves a full day, and a flight if you have the money and the luck.

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Canada's national aviation collection lives in a delta-shaped hall on the old RCAF station at Rockcliffe, five kilometres north-east of Parliament Hill. More than 130 aircraft cover 1909 to the present, and few collections anywhere are this complete or this original. The big draw for a British visitor is Lancaster X KB944, the most complete Lancaster X in existence. Around it stand a Castle Bromwich Spitfire, a Canadian-built Hurricane, a Lysander and a Swordfish, plus a First World War room that holds the world's only surviving German multi-engined bomber of the war and the only complete Junkers J.I. Then come the things that are uniquely Canadian: the nose of Avro Arrow 25206, the first Beaver and the first Twin Otter, and the HS-2L La Vigilance, recovered from an Ontario lake. Allow a full day. Book the Reserve Hangar tour on arrival.

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The official museum of the United States Air Force occupies four vast hangars on historic Wright Field, six miles north-east of Dayton, Ohio, the town where the Wright brothers built their aeroplanes. It is the oldest and largest military aviation museum in the world, with more than 360 aircraft, missiles and spacecraft, and admission is free. The galleries run in order from a reproduction 1909 Wright Military Flyer to the F-22A, by way of the B-17F Memphis Belle, the B-29 Bockscar, a B-36J and the only surviving XB-70A Valkyrie. Few museums anywhere hold so many sole survivors and record airframes. The fourth building adds the presidential fleet, SAM 26000 among them, and you may walk through four of them. Allow a full day at least; the museum suggests two.

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The Smithsonian's out-of-town annexe, built beside Washington Dulles airport because the National Mall building could never hold the big stuff. Two vast arched hangars — the Boeing Aviation Hangar and the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar — contain well over 200 aircraft and spacecraft, parked nose-to-tail on the floor and hung three deep from the trusses. The roll of honour is absurd: SR-71A 61-7972, which landed here after a record coast-to-coast dash; the B-29 Enola Gay; Air France Concorde F-BVFA; the Boeing 367-80 that begat the 707; and the Space Shuttle Discovery. Behind them sit the only surviving Do 335, Ar 234 and Kyushu Shinden. Admission is free, the parking is not, and a whole day is barely enough. For the British visitor there is also a beautifully restored Hurricane IIC.

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The National Naval Aviation Museum is the US Navy's own aviation museum, and the largest of its kind anywhere. It occupies some 350,000 sq ft of halls and 37 acres of grounds aboard Naval Air Station Pensacola, the 'Cradle of Naval Aviation' on the Florida Panhandle. More than 150 Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard aircraft are displayed, from a 1911 Triad replica to an F-14D Tomcat. Among them is the Curtiss NC-4, the first aeroplane across the Atlantic, which finished its flight at Plymouth in 1919. Four Blue Angels Skyhawks hang in diamond formation in a glass atrium, and the Lake Michigan wrecks have come home restored, including a Dauntless that fought at Midway. Admission is free. Getting through the base gate is the hard part, especially for a British passport-holder (see Access). The team practises overhead most spring and summer weeks.

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Pima Air & Space is what happens when a museum is built next door to the world's largest aircraft storage yard. Laid out over 80 acres of Sonoran Desert beside Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, south-east of Tucson, it shows something near 400 aircraft, about half of them parked out under a hard blue sky and the rest in six hangars. The scale is the point: a B-36 that dwarfs everything around it, a full row of B-52s, the Kennedy-era Air Force One, NASA's SOFIA 747 and the oldest surviving SR-71. Yet there are quieter rewards for the visitor from Britain, among them a Shackleton, a Gannet and the 390th Bomb Group's own memorial museum with its restored B-17. Allow a full day, carry water, and be warned that the famous Boneyard bus tours have ended for good.

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The Museum of Flight stands on the western edge of Boeing Field, a few miles south of downtown Seattle. It is the museum the Boeing company's home town deserves. The core of it is Boeing's own first factory, the 1909 Red Barn, floated two miles up the Duwamish to where it stands now. Around it are the T.A. Wilson Great Gallery, a glass hall of more than fifty aircraft; a two-storey wing of First and Second World War fighters; a space gallery holding NASA's shuttle trainer; and the Aviation Pavilion, a three-acre roof over nineteen big aeroplanes. The collection is full of firsts: the first 747, the first 727, the first jet Air Force One and the only surviving M-21 Blackbird. For a British visitor there is also Concorde G-BOAG, which you can walk through, and a D-Day Spitfire. Allow a full day.

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An Essex-class aircraft carrier tied up at the end of West 46th Street, carrying a Space Shuttle, a CIA spy plane and the fastest Concorde of them all. USS Intrepid (CV-11) fought from Truk to Okinawa, soaked up kamikazes, hunted Soviet submarines, went three times to Vietnam and fished two NASA crews out of the Atlantic; since 1982 she has been a museum on the Hudson. The hangar deck holds the ship's history and a restored Corsair, the flight deck a park of some two dozen naval jets and helicopters with Manhattan's towers as backdrop, and a pavilion aft shelters the orbiter Enterprise. Alongside lies Growler, the only American nuclear-missile submarine open to the public, and on the pier sits British Airways' G-BOAD. Allow a day, bring a jumper for the flight deck wind, and do not skip the bridge.

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