04/06/2026
🚨📢 TALL TAILS HAS LANDED! Our new Tall Tails exhibition opens at 9.30am today, so please come along to our place to be wowed by the scale of our latest exhibits, and the cheerleaders for our Home for Heroes fundraising campaign.
The tails belonging to two national heroes – our Lockheed C-130 Hercules and P-3K2 Orion aircraft - were officially launched as a new exhibition last night.
The aircraft are too large to fit in our storage hangars with their tails on. So we turned their tails into an exhibition until we can raise the money needed to build them a new home large enough to fit the Hercules and Orion - tails and all.
As you can see from the pictures, the Hercules and Orion tails are so huge they barely fit in our largest display area – so we’re going to need a bigger museum space!
Getting these tails on display has been a huge effort involving a whole lot of our museum team and supporters.
We'd like to say a huge thank you to kaumatua Ruawhitu Pokaia for the karakia to get last night off to a perfect start.
Thanks to our board Chair Kevin Short, board members, No. 5 and No. 40 Squadron aviators past and present, local MPs, councillors, friends and supporters who came along to the launch last night.
The Lockheed tails needed some specialist help to prepare them the display, and we’d like to thank Dave and Matt Harward of Harward and Son for the precision manufacturing work, mechanical engineering consultant Motovated for the design work and sign off, and Titan Cranes for the delicate lift into place.
Finally, thanks to our patient visitors for putting up with a disrupted week as we put Tall Tails together.
Tall Tails is free for New Zealanders and is on every day at the Air Force Museum of New Zealand from 9.30am until 4.30pm.
If you’d like to support our Tall Tails campaign, go to
https://airforcemuseum.co.nz/donate/
