The U.S. Navy built two enormous hangars at Tillamook in 1942, part of a network of lighter-than-air stations along the Pacific coast tasked with defending against Japanese submarine attacks on Allied shipping. Naval Air Station Tillamook was a six-blimp facility, and both Hangar A and Hangar B were constructed to accommodate the massive K-class airships that patrolled the coastline. The blimps flew slow, methodical search patterns over the ocean, scanning for periscopes and torpedo wakes. After the war ended, the station was decommissioned in 1948 and the Port of Tillamook Bay eventually took over the property. Hangar A met a dramatic end on August 22, 1992, when fire consumed it entirely. Hangar B survived, and in 1994 it opened its doors -- those colossal, thirty-ton doors -- as an aviation museum.

Walking the museum floor feels less like visiting a conventional collection and more like stumbling into a private airfield tucked inside a cathedral. The aircraft range from a Nieuport 11 replica -- the kind of biplane that dueled above the Western Front in 1916 -- to a Cold War-era PZL-Mielec Lim-6bis, a Polish-built variant of the Soviet MiG-17. A Douglas A-26C Invader sits alongside a PT-17 Stearman trainer, the biplane that taught a generation of American pilots to fly during World War II. One of the more unusual residents is an Aero Spacelines Mini Guppy, a bulbous cargo aircraft originally designed to transport rocket stages for NASA. Cockpit sections from a Boeing 727 and a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom let visitors climb into the seats where pilots once sat. In 2025, the museum added an HU-25 Guardian -- a rare Coast Guard jet -- and began fundraising to restore its F-14 Tomcat, the fighter immortalized in Top Gun.

The museum reaches beyond aviation into broader wartime history. An interactive walk-through replica of an Anderson air raid shelter recreates the experience of huddling underground during a bombing raid. A Curtiss SB2C Helldiver crash exhibit presents the wreckage of a dive bomber recovered from a wartime accident, the crumpled metal a visceral reminder of the risks naval aviators faced in training as well as combat. Perhaps most unexpectedly, the museum hosts "Spots of Light: To Be a Woman in the Holocaust," an exhibit exploring women's experiences during the Holocaust -- a subject far removed from aviation but housed here because the hangar's vast interior can accommodate traveling exhibitions that smaller museums cannot. A walk-through recreation of the station's pigeon loft recalls the era when the Navy trained homing pigeons as backup communication systems, a low-tech solution to the very real problem of radio failure at sea.

Hangar B has outlived its twin, its Navy commission, and several ownership disputes, but the Oregon coast is relentless. Salt air, driving rain, and sustained winds have been wearing at the wooden structure for over eighty years. Between 2013 and 2014, a significant portion of the collection owned by Jack Erickson was relocated to Madras, Oregon, leaving the museum diminished but still operational under the Port of Tillamook Bay. The Port continued operations, and by 2016 the Classic Aircraft Aviation Museum had moved additional planes in to fill the gap. Then came December 2025, when a coastal windstorm folded back an approximately 170-by-30-foot section of the roof, exposing the interior to the elements. The Port had already proposed a structural study earlier that year, but the storm accelerated the timeline dramatically. Restoration estimates start at twenty million dollars -- a staggering sum for a rural Oregon port district, but the alternative is losing the largest clear-span wooden structure humans have ever built.