How the collection came to be
The museum began with a wreck. In 1960 a Boeing Model 80A-1, the last of its type retired by United in 1934, was recovered from a rubbish dump in Anchorage and flown south to Seattle in a USAF C-124. The effort to restore it brought a group of local enthusiasts together, and they formed the Pacific Northwest Aviation Historical Foundation. The museum's own history dates the Foundation to 1964; most other sources say 1965. Its first exhibits went on show in 1965 in a 10,000 sq ft space at Seattle Center, the site of the 1962 World's Fair. The Foundation also bought Boeing 247D N13347, which had ended up crop-dusting and cloud-seeding before being grounded at Taft, California. It was repaired and flown at airshows in the North-West in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The permanent site dates from 1975. That year the Port of Seattle leased the museum land at Boeing Field for 99 years and sold it the Red Barn for a dollar. Built in 1909, the Red Barn was where the Boeing Airplane Company started. It was floated about two miles up the Duwamish River by barge, and the cost of moving and restoring it was met by William Boeing Jr. The restored barn opened in 1983 as the museum's first permanent home. On 10 July 1987 Vice-President George Bush and four Mercury astronauts opened the T.A. Wilson Great Gallery, a glass hall built to hang aircraft from its roof trusses. In 1991 the museum acquired the CIA's Lockheed M-21 60-6940, the only one left of the two M-21s built to launch the D-21 reconnaissance drone. With a D-21 back on its pylon, it has been the centrepiece of the Great Gallery ever since.
Boeing's own prototypes came next. On 6 April 1995 the first 747, RA001, made its last flight and Boeing gave it to the museum after 5,300 flying hours. United had already given the first 727, N7001U, in 1991. In June 1996 the first presidential jet, VC-137B SAM 970, arrived on loan from the National Museum of the US Air Force. It had carried Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and it took Kissinger to his secret talks with the Chinese. The B-29 T-Square 54 came from Lowry AFB in 1994 to finish its restoration in Seattle. On 5 November 2003 British Airways delivered Concorde G-BOAG, flying from New York in 3 hr 55 min 2 sec.
The site grew outward and upward. The Library and Archives building followed in 2002. The J. Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing opened on 6 June 2004, the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, with First World War aircraft upstairs and Second World War aircraft below. Across East Marginal Way, the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery went up on the west campus; the museum dates it to 2011. In 2012 it received NASA's Space Shuttle Full Fuselage Trainer, the oldest mock-up in Houston's Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. In 2016 the open-sided Aviation Pavilion finally put the big airliners and bombers under cover. The 727 and the 247D made their last flights from Paine Field to Boeing Field that spring, on 2 March and 26 April. In 2019 B-52G 59-2584, Midnight Express, was moved from Paine Field to become the centrepiece of the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park.
The museum is now a private non-profit with more than 150 aircraft, of which 122 have entries in its online catalogue. Wikipedia gives 465,504 visitors in 2024. Restoration continues in a 23,000 sq ft workshop at Paine Field in Everett. The longest-running project there is the first Comet 4C, which has been under restoration since 1995. The first rescue, the Model 80A-1, still hangs in the Great Gallery as the only surviving Boeing 80.
