HARS Aviation Museum is a unique experience
HARS Aviation Museum is the only place in Australia where you can see almost 50 planes that have a special place in Australian history.
Not only do many of these amazing aircraft still fly, or have working engines, but you can even walk through, sit in or climb in some of them. That’s cool, for kids and adults!
More than 800 volunteer members of the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) give their time and skill so visitors can have – up close and personal – a unique and hands-on experience.
Tour guides – all volunteers – take visitors around the hangars and provide commentary which adds to the occasion.
A favourite is Australia’s only remaining “Queen of the Skies” Boeing 747-400. Weighing 178 tonnes it dominates the airport. When you walk on board you can see how this massive jet had seats for 467 passengers. It was the first to fly non-stop from London to Sydney when delivered to Qantas back in 1989.
Equally impressive is the Lockheed Super Constellation “Connie” which was restored over a five-year period by HARS volunteers and flown from America to Australia in 1996. When visitors walk on board, they experience what it was like in the 1950s to fly around the world when Qantas operated 16 of these aircraft. Now it is the only Super Constellation in the world left flying.
Other historic aircraft on show – and amazingly still able to fly – include the gleaming DC-3 “Hawdon” which flew the first flight for TAA from Melbourne to Sydney in 1946 … plus two ex-RAAF de Havilland Caribou, a three-engine Drover built at Bankstown in 1951 and former RAAF fighter jets the Vampire, Sabre, Mirage and F-111.
Submarine hunting maritime patrol aircraft on show are a Catalina, Neptune, Orion … along with former RAN Tracker, Sea Venom, Sea Fury aircraft with folding wings and a Wessex helicopter which all operated from our Australian aircraft carriers.
Also under restoration is a flying replica of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith’s Fokker “Southern Cross” with its three Jacobs motors.
HARS Aviation Museum is located at Shellharbour Airport, just off the Princes Highway at Albion Park Rail, between Wollongong and Kiama.
Along with its Café Connie which serves great coffee and delicious food, HARS Aviation Museum is open daily (except Christmas Day) from 9.30am to 3.30 pm with plenty of parking. The last tour leaves at 2.45 pm.
