Hiller Aviation Museum

The museum at San Carlos Airport is named for Stanley Hiller Junior, who at fifteen years old designed and flew the world's first successful coaxial helicopter. That was in nineteen forty-four. By seventeen he had established the first helicopter factory on the West Coast, in Berkeley, California.

Hiller Aircraft went on to produce more than two thousand helicopters, many of them flown in Korea and later in Vietnam. Hiller spent decades collecting historic aircraft, and by the nineteen eighties a warehouse in Redwood City held more than a dozen of his designs. After a lease at the San Carlos Airport was secured in nineteen ninety-six, the collection moved into a proper museum building that opened in June nineteen ninety-eight.

The collection now exceeds fifty aircraft, including early prototypes, military helicopters, and the nose section of a retired British Airways Boeing Seven Forty-Seven. More than a million visitors have come through since opening day.