Almost every aircraft in the museum is privately owned and on loan, and almost every one is kept in flight-worthy condition. The collection turns over - planes come, planes go. But the standouts have included a Piper J-3 Flitfire (NC1776) that Orville Wright flew on a 1943 War Bond tour — the aircraft carried RAF Benevolent Fund markings from its 1941 origins. A 1930 Savoia-Marchetti S.56, one of only two left in the world, on three-year loan from the Reynolda House Museum in Winston-Salem. A Cessna L-19 Bird Dog from the Korean War. A Stearman PT-13D Kaydet that trained American and Allied pilots through the Second World War. A Beechcraft T-34 Mentor and a Swiss Pilatus P-3 - Switzerland's answer to the T-34. One-of-a-kind experimentals: a Shehane Aerosport Quail built in 1978 around a Volkswagen engine; the Purcell Sea Sprite (1975) and Purcell Flightsail Pelican (1990s); the Rutan VariEze, the first ever sold in North Carolina, third sold in the country.

In 1998 Craig Branson - the businessman who took over the foundation after the Peddycords' deaths - bought a B-25 Mitchell bomber for restoration and got the community behind building a second hangar to hold it. The Mitchell was the World War II twin-engine medium bomber Jimmy Doolittle's raiders flew off the deck of the USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo in April 1942. The aircraft was completely restored in 2004 and made limited flights in 2004 and 2005. Branson died in 2006. The B-25 is no longer at the museum, but the hangar remains, and over the years it has held an F4U-4 Corsair courtesy of Classic Fighters of America pilot Doug Matthews - one of an estimated forty airworthy Corsairs left in the world - and a Beechcraft C-45A and the T-34 Mentor mentioned above. Outside the hangars sit a WWII Plymouth staff car, a 1942 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a 1977 Army Jeep, and President Truman's presidential limousine.

Since 1996 the museum has hosted a fly-in on the second Saturday in June. Visiting pilots fly in from across the Carolinas and Virginia. There are free small-plane rides for children, helicopter rides, a racing car exhibit, ham radio demonstrations, remote-control aircraft demonstrations. The Marines do face painting. In 2009 the fly-in drew 80 visiting aircraft and 1,500 patrons. By 2010 those figures jumped to 150 aircraft and 2,500 patrons. In 2012, 120 to 150 planes flew in - including the museum's old B-25, called the Korean War Hero, and a Beech 18. The fly-in is the museum's signature event. It is also the event that killed its founder, and it is held in the same month, almost on the same weekend. The volunteers and staff who run the place do not pretend the history isn't there. They just keep doing the work.

The North Carolina Aviation Museum is in Asheboro - not to be confused with the Carolinas Aviation Museum, which is in Charlotte and which most North Carolinians know as the home of the Airbus A320 that Captain Sullenberger landed in the Hudson River. The Asheboro museum is smaller, scrappier, more focused on actively flying privately-owned aircraft, and it doubles as the official site of the North Carolina Aviation Hall of Fame - a designation it picked up in 2001-2002 when the facility expanded its mission to include uniforms, weapons, artwork, and the 150-plus aircraft models that hang from the gift shop ceiling. Bob Moon, the museum's first manager, assembled most of those models and donated them before his death in October 2007. The gift shop is named for him. Inside it, miniature Wright Flyers, Messerschmitts, Mustangs and Thunderbolts hang from threads as quiet memorials to the people who built this place.