Five hundred metres from the museum building, the Heritage Air Park lays out a timeline in aluminum and jet fuel. A CF-100 Canuck, Canada's first indigenous all-weather fighter, stands alongside the CF-101 Voodoo that replaced it during the NORAD years, when Comox was a front-line interceptor base tasked with detecting Soviet bombers approaching over the pole. A CT-133 Silver Star - the trainer that generations of Canadian military pilots flew before earning their wings - shares the tarmac with a Douglas Dakota and a Piasecki H-21 helicopter, its tandem rotors frozen mid-revolution. The park serves as an open-air classroom where the evolution of Canadian military aviation becomes tangible, each aircraft marking a shift in doctrine, technology, or threat.

Inside the museum, the Second World War exhibits hold objects that resist easy categorization. A Japanese fire balloon - one of thousands launched across the Pacific on the jet stream, designed to set the forests of western North America ablaze - hangs as evidence of a campaign that most Canadians never learned about in school. The balloons carried incendiary devices over 9,000 kilometres, and some reached as far inland as Manitoba. Nearby, a handwritten logbook from Stalag Luft III, kept by airman John Colwell during his imprisonment, offers a more intimate scale of the same conflict. The exhibits also honor West Coast airmen James Francis Edwards and Douglas 'Duke' Warren, connecting the grand sweep of global war to the particular communities of the Comox Valley.

The museum divides its squadron displays into two categories that tell their own story: past and present. The past-squadrons exhibit features 409 Squadron, once a night fighter unit, represented by an Orenda 11 turbojet engine and an AIR-2 Genie nuclear-tipped missile training device - a relic of the era when Canada's air defense contemplated using atomic weapons against incoming bomber formations. The present-squadrons section highlights 442 Squadron, whose search and rescue technicians parachute into some of the most rugged terrain on the coast, and 407 Squadron, the maritime patrol unit whose Wright 3350 Cyclone engine speaks to the long hours spent hunting submarines. Between them, these displays trace a base that has reinvented itself through every era of Canadian defense.

Down the road from the Heritage Air Park, the Y2K Spitfire restoration hangar houses one of the museum's most ambitious projects: the painstaking reconstruction of a Supermarine Spitfire, the fighter that became synonymous with Allied air power during the Battle of Britain. The project draws on volunteer expertise ranging from metalwork to avionics, and visitors can watch the restoration in progress. Combined with an aviation reference library and an art gallery featuring works inspired by flight, the museum operates as more than a repository of artifacts. It functions as a living workshop where the mechanical craft of aviation - the riveting, the engine tuning, the meticulous matching of parts to plans - remains as vital as the history those machines made.