Delta Flight Museum: From Crop Dusters to Continents

Right on the edge of Hartsfield-Jackson airport sit Delta's two original maintenance hangars from the nineteen forties, now home to the Delta Flight Museum. The story inside starts far from Atlanta. Delta's ancestor, Huff Daland Dusters, launched in Macon, Georgia in nineteen twenty-five as a crop-dusting company. It rebranded as Delta Air Service, named for the Mississippi Delta it was originally hired to spray for boll weevils.

By the time it became a passenger carrier and settled in Atlanta, the airline grew into one of the largest in the world. The museum's most striking exhibit is The Spirit of Delta, a Boeing seven sixty-seven that employees bought for the company in nineteen eighty-two by pooling their own money during a difficult stretch for the industry. That collective act of loyalty says something about what Delta built here. The museum traces eighty-plus years of aviation history through five historic aircraft, hundreds of artifacts, and archives that early employees saved when they realized the company was in danger of forgetting where it came from.