The Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Society formed in 1972, a group of enthusiasts who wanted to preserve aircraft and aviation artefacts from East Anglia. East Anglia is densely layered with aviation history. The USAAF Eighth Air Force, the RAF, the Royal Observer Corps, and the postwar British military all left aircraft, equipment, memories, and the occasional unmarked crash site behind. The Society's collection grew, and grew, and grew. Today the museum employs only a single full-time member of staff. Day-to-day maintenance falls on a team of volunteers, funded by admission fees, public donations, corporate sponsorship, and various government grants.

Beyond the aircraft on display, the museum's volunteers practice what they call wreckology, the systematic study of aircraft crash sites across East Anglia. Hundreds of Allied bombers and fighters went down in the region during the Second World War. Many were never properly excavated. The wreckology projects locate, document, and sometimes recover material from these sites, building a record of what happened to crews whose final moments were spread across thousands of fields. The work is delicate, slow, and often connects to families of the airmen who never came home.

The museum's de Havilland Sea Vixen FAW.1, owned privately rather than by the museum itself, was one of the British Fleet Air Arm's distinctive twin-boom carrier fighters of the 1960s. The flyable replica of the Colditz Cock is a recreation of the wooden glider that prisoners of war secretly built inside the Colditz Castle attic, intending to launch themselves to freedom. It was discovered before being used. A Vickers Valetta C.2 represents the workhorse transport that supported British operations from the late 1940s onward. The FMA IA 58 Pucara is the museum's most direct combat trophy: an Argentine ground-attack aircraft captured by British forces during the Falklands War.

Cold War jets dominate the outdoor lines. A BAe Sea Harrier FA.2, an English Electric Canberra T.4, an English Electric Lightning F.1, a Gloster Javelin FAW.9R, and a Gloster Meteor F (TT).8 trace the British jet evolution from the late 1940s into the 1980s. Two American types stand alongside them: a Lockheed T-33A and a North American F-100D Super Sabre, both formerly USAF, both reminders of the long American military presence in East Anglia. There is a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15bis built in Czechoslovakia as an Aero S-103, formerly of the Czech Air Force, and a French Dassault Mystere IV. The McDonnell Douglas Phantom FGR.2 wears Royal Air Force colors, the version the British operated.

The indoor exhibits are arranged by theme rather than just by aircraft type. There are dedicated displays for the Royal Observer Corps, the network of trained civilian spotters who watched the British skies through the Second World War; for RAF Bomber Command, whose crews suffered the highest casualty rate of any British service in the war; for RAF Air-Sea Rescue, the often-overlooked branch that pulled airmen out of the North Sea; and for RAF Coastal Command, the long-range maritime patrol force. The museum's bias is toward stories, the human experience behind the metal. The aircraft are the largest artefacts, but they are not the whole collection.