The Fleet Air Arm is the flying section of the Royal Navy, and the collection concentrates on naval aircraft.
Hall 1 – 100 years of naval flying – various fixed wing aircraft and helicopters
Hall 2 – World war II , with various planes, including a rare Fugi Ohka Kamikaze aircraft., and several exhibitions
Hall 3 – The ‘Aircraft Carrier Experience’ audiovisual display, and ‘Projecting Power’ an exhibition about the Fleet Air Arm’s postwar missions.
The ‘Aircraft Carrier Experience’ is the museum’s showpiece, and starts with a simulated flight in a Wessex helicopter. You land on the deck of a carrier, with full-sized aircraft parked around. Aircraft noisily take off on missions. Then you visit other parts of the carrier such as the control room and lifts. This is all rather well done, but it does take about an hour to go through the whole thing, and once you have embarked on the sequence you can’t easily get out without going to the end. Parents are warned that the noise and vibration of the ‘Wessex flight’ alone is enough to terrorise nervous children.
Hall 4 – contains several aircraft including a Concorde, and exhibitions about theory of flight and the Falklands, plus access to public viewing areas of the adjoining air station, where operations may be in progress.
The minimum time to go round and see everything is 4 hours, and the museum recommends an all day visit. It’s just as well that there’s a late admisson discount for the last 1½ hours before closing.
The FAA Museum’s unique selling point is that it displays good quality aircraft in their original condition, which is not at all the same thing as ‘in flying condition’. When one sees a vintage aircraft overhead, and after seeing what goes into making them airworthy, one has the feeling that one is looking at the air equivalent of the hammer that has had three handles and two heads. The FAAM planes have the original everything, down to the original paint job. In the Museum there’s an exhibit that made me feel a bit sad every time I saw it – a prototype naval aircraft from the 1950’s, still pristine and shiny, which has never flown and probably never even had its engine fired up.
You might want to know that the reserve collection is just across the road, and opened for visitors once a year, when it attracts visitors from all over the UK.