Delta Flight Museum: From Crop Dusters to Global Giant

Delta Air Lines began in nineteen twenty-five as Huff Daland Dusters in Macon, Georgia, making it the world's first commercial aerial crop dusting operation. Three years later a group of investors bought the assets and renamed it Delta Air Service. The airline moved its headquarters to Atlanta in nineteen forty-one and never left.

The Delta Flight Museum sits adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in two original nineteen forties maintenance hangars, sixty-eight thousand square feet of aviation history inside the airline's own backyard. The nonprofit museum was incorporated in nineteen ninety-five and opened to the public in two thousand fourteen after a comprehensive renovation. Inside you can walk through a retired Boeing Seven Forty-Seven, see the cockpit of a nineteen Thirty-one Travel Air, and trace the full arc from a Mississippi crop-duster to one of the largest airlines on earth. Atlanta and Delta grew up together, and the museum makes that case in steel and aluminum.