The Central Australian Aviation Museum was opened in 1979 in the town of Alice Springs. The museum's displays are housed in the hangar of the former Connellan Airways in the Araluen neighbourhood, which was once the town's airfield. Nearby stands the home of local aviation pioneer aviation pioneer Eddie Connellan.
Connellan bought this hangar in 1939 from a factory in Sydney and brought it to Alice Springs, the headquarters of his small airline, which delivered mail and other freight services throughout the state of the Northern Territories. It was Eddie Connellan who, in July 1939, made the first flight, that didn't take off from a city airfield.
In the late 1970s, an Alice Springs community committee allocated $25,000 to restore the Connellan hangar, which by then had fallen into disrepair, and turned it into the Aviation Museum. In 1982, they opened a dioramic "Kookabarra" pavilion, and in 1983 the twin-engine monoplane "Dove".
Today, the museum offers an insight into the aviation history of Central Australia and the Northern Territories, starting with De Havilland's first flight, in October 1921. Among the exhibits is a Royal Service aeroplane "Flying Doctor", the "Wackett" training aircraft, the aforementioned twin-engined monoplane, the Australian-built Kookabarra glider, the Derwent jet engine, numerous aviation relics, historical photographs and other items.
The Kookabarra diorama pavilion tells the tragic story of the ill-fated flight of Hitchcock and Anderson, who perished in the desert in 1929 while searching for Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm. The video explains the circumstances of the tragedy, and in the pavilion itself you can see the remains of the Westland Vigion aeroplane, in which the airmen died. The wreckage was recovered in 1978 and donated to a museum.
