Kermit Weeks incorporated the Weeks Air Museum in 1981, but the collection took shape in 1985 when he purchased 36 aircraft from the Tallmantz Aviation collection. The museum opened in March 1987 at Tamiami Executive Airport near Kendall, Florida. Then Hurricane Andrew arrived in August 1992. The hangar collapsed. Aircraft that had survived decades of combat and neglect were twisted by the storm. Weeks rebuilt, reopened at the same location in July 1994, and then moved the entire operation to a new site in Polk City, halfway between Orlando and Tampa. Fantasy of Flight opened on October 19, 1995, and the name said everything about its ambition: this was not a place for quiet reverence in front of display placards. It was a place where you could walk through a full-scale World War I trench with biplanes overhead and climb inside a B-17 Flying Fortress staged to look like a winter night at RAF Horham.

What set Fantasy of Flight apart from every other aviation museum was its immersion environments. Visitors entered through the fuselage of a World War II-era Douglas C-47 Skytrain, complete with a seated paratrooper in full kit and a Jumpmaster standing at the open side hatch. A red light over the door blinked to green as guests approached, and through the hatch lay the rest of the museum. Beyond the C-47, a simulator offered the sensation of flight, a passage through heavy shrapnel-resistant curtains opened into a full-scale World War I trench, and the centerpiece was a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress housed in a darkened room staged as a maintenance area at a wartime English airfield. Guests walked through the bomb bay and visited the cockpit. These were experiences no textbook could replicate, designed to make visitors feel the claustrophobia, the cold, the weight of the machines that changed the twentieth century.

The collection grew to become the largest privately owned assemblage of vintage aircraft in the world. The inventory reads like an encyclopedia of powered flight: a Ford Trimotor nicknamed the City of Philadelphia, a Consolidated PBY Catalina, a Short Sandringham flying boat, Spitfires, Corsairs, a Polikarpov I-16 from the Soviet Union, a Kawasaki Ki-61 from Japan. In 2011, Weeks flew to England to purchase a C-47 that had dropped paratroopers during D-Day and Operation Market Garden. He and his crew flew it back across the Atlantic. By December 2013, the museum was building a reproduction of a Benoist XIV flying boat to mark the hundredth anniversary of the first scheduled commercial airline flight. The facility sits on its own private airfield, known as Orlampa Inc. Airport, identifier FA08, with two grass runways and seaplane access via adjacent Lake Agnes.

Grand plans for a themed destination called Orlampa, featuring villages devoted to different eras of aviation history, never fully materialized. The site was too far from Orlando's established theme parks to capture casual tourist traffic. On March 4, 2014, Fantasy of Flight announced it would close to daily visitors, though private events continued. A scaled-down exhibition reopened in January 2015. By mid-2020, the facility was struggling. The Compass Rose Diner, an Art Deco restaurant modeled after 1930s airport lunch counters with terrazzo floors and curved architectural lines, had closed and sold off its equipment. The DC-3 mannequin was stolen in 2018; the plane itself was removed in 2024. Yet the collection endures. Weeks continues restoration work, and recent groundbreaking on a new hangar signals what the museum calls Act III. Fantasy of Flight may yet find its audience, one willing to drive past the billboards for a chance to stand inside history.