ATLANTA, Ga. – A converted maintenance room of Delta Air Lines Inc.’s very first airplane hangar holds some of the airline’s treasures – one of the company’s original passenger tickets, old photos from the company’s crop-dusting days and decades of flight attendant uniforms.
Much larger artifacts – actual planes once flown by the company – are displayed inside the hangar, including a propeller plane from the era when carrying mail was more profitable than carrying passengers, and a modern Boeing 767-200, the $30 million jet that airline employees bought for the company in 1982.
Little known to the public, the Delta Heritage Museum preserves the company’s 77-year history in two of the airline’s oldest hangars. Within a converted room in one hangar, an archivist collects galley china, saves old uniforms from retirees and even scouts out rare items on eBay.
“The more you know about the collection, the more you know about Delta history,” said Marie Force, the museum’s archives manager.
Elsewhere, through bankruptcies, mergers and other financial turmoil, other airlines also preserve the legacy of commercial flight either in their own museums or office displays. For example, American Airlines has aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh’s old flight logs and a 1940 DC-3 passenger plane, the Flagship Knoxville, preserved at its museum next to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
The problem is, these airline collections can be difficult for the public to see. Delta’s museum is located at the company’s corporate headquarters, which is not open to the public for security reasons.
Visitors can see the museum only by appointment, although officials are trying to make it more accessible with plans to offer limited hours to the public, such as tours once or twice a week, museum director Julia Varnedoe said.
Even the country’s largest airline museum – the American Airlines C.R. Smith Museum – has difficulty attracting more than 35,000 visitors a year because it’s located in an out-of-the-way spot. The 13-year-old museum was built on company property at the south end of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, which is rarely seen by travelers.
The Delta museum’s air-conditioned archival storage room – which is slightly smaller than the dining area of a typical fast-food restaurant – contains the company’s earliest existing passenger ticket, a 1929 trip costing $13.25 for a 120-mile flight from Monroe, La., where the airline once was based, to Jackson, Miss.
There’s also a 1931 business card from C.E. Woolman, Delta’s first CEO, that shows the company’s Depression-era roots – it displays a picture of a biplane crop-dusting a field – and a 1940s-era photo ID badge, new at the time because of World War II security concerns.
Capt. Michael Quiello, a 26-year Delta pilot and the airline’s current vice president of corporate safety, security and compliance, visits the museum every few weeks, often looking at the company’s old propeller planes.
“I think about who sat in that airplane in the 1940s and who was flying it and who came before me,” Quiello said, adding that the museum has helped him learn more about the company he works for. “As a family, you try to find out your heritage and you kind of get an understanding. … The same thing goes for a company.”
The museum hopes to show more artifacts within an air-conditioned portion of “The Spirit of Delta,” the Boeing 767 that the company’s employees purchased in December. The plane eventually will be on display to the public, Varnedoe said.
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