Qantas was registered on 16 November 1920 with a name no one could love: the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services. Its founders, the World War I aviators Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness alongside grazier Fergus McMaster, mercifully shortened it to its initials. The first board meeting was held in Winton in 1921, and there the directors decided to move operations 177 kilometres south-east to Longreach. From this base, scheduled flights began in 1922, stitching together remote mail and passenger runs across an outback where roads were rough and distances cruel. The museum opened in 1996 inside the heritage-listed 1922 hangar itself, then expanded as part of a major Queensland and federal heritage project at the end of the 1990s. To stand in that hangar is to stand at the start of the line that became one of the oldest continuously operating airlines on earth.

The centrepiece is a Boeing 747-238B named City of Bunbury, registration VH-EBQ, and its story is staggering in its scale. Qantas accepted the aircraft in December 1979, and over its working life it is estimated to have carried more than 5.4 million passengers and flown over 82 million kilometres, the equivalent of ten years of continuous flight. It is the only surviving 747-200 fitted with Rolls-Royce engines. Qantas donated it to the museum, and on 16 November 2002 the giant touched down at Longreach for the last time, landing on a runway never built for jumbos to settle permanently onto outback soil. Visitors can do more than look. A guided Wing Walk straps you into a harness and lets you walk out onto the wing itself, a perspective on the machine's sheer size that no terminal gate could ever offer.

Beside the 747 stands something arguably rarer: a Boeing 707-138B, registration VH-EBA, the very first jet Qantas ever operated. It was the first of its specific type, a short-bodied 707 built to Qantas specifications, and it is the only 707 anywhere on display in a museum still in passenger-carrying configuration. Every other preserved 707 in the world is a former military aircraft. This one had wandered far from home. It was restored at Southend Airport in England in 2006 and flown back to Australia that December, returning forty-seven years after Boeing first handed it to Qantas. The collection reaches further back, too, with a Consolidated Catalina flying boat, a former Qantas DC-3, and replicas of the fragile biplanes, an Avro 504K and de Havilland machines, that the airline actually flew in its earliest, most precarious years.

The desert sun is hard on aircraft, so the museum built an Airpark Roof to shade its open-air fleet, completed in 2020 along with a Light and Sound Show that projects the airline's history directly onto the fuselages of the 747, 707 and the restored Super Constellation after dark. A year later the museum unveiled a faithful recreation of the Boeing 747 Captain Cook Lounge, the upstairs cocktail bars that defined long-haul glamour on the earliest Qantas jumbos from 1971 until the business-class era arrived at the end of the decade. The effect of the whole place is a kind of double vision: the romance of jet-age travel and the gritty origin story of pioneers in canvas-and-wire aircraft, held together on the same outback airfield. It is fitting that the airline's beginning is preserved here, beside the Stockman's Hall of Fame, where the story of the stockmen and the story of the flyers, the two great threads of inland Australia, are told within sight of each other.