Flugausstellung Hermeskeil

Anyone driving along the Hunsrückhöhenstraße near Hermeskeil for the first time briefly thinks they’re hallucinating: Between fields and forest stands a Concorde, next to it helicopters the size of trucks and a row of Soviet combat jets. The Flugausstellung Hermeskeil (Hermeskeil aviation exhibition) – officially Flugausstellung Peter Junior – is one of the largest private aircraft collections in Germany. For spotters it is above all one thing: an open-air archive of types that nobody has seen in the sky for decades.

A collection that grew out of a family

Most big aviation museums in Germany have a backer with a budget and curators: the Deutsche Museum with the Flugwerft Schleißheim, the foundation behind the Dornier Museum or the association behind the Technik Museum Speyer. Hermeskeil works differently. The exhibition is a family business that the Junior family opened in 1973. Leo Junior is considered the founder; today the exhibition carries the name Peter Junior.

Since the opening, the collection has grown piece by piece. According to the museum, there are now more than 100 aircraft and helicopters as well as about 60 aircraft engines on the grounds. The home page of the website even gives a higher number – discrepancies like this are common with private collections, because exhibits are added, swapped or given away.

According to the museum, the outdoor grounds cover about 76,000 square meters. In addition there are four exhibition halls totaling about 3,600 square meters, holding more than 40 smaller aircraft, gliders, replicas and engines. Most of the big machines, by contrast, stand outdoors – and that is exactly what shapes the character of the visit.

Where the aircraft came from

A private collection of this size doesn’t grow by chance, but through opportunities. Two sources have shaped Hermeskeil in particular:

• Retired airliners. From the 1970s on, airliners that had ended their careers or finished serving as training airframes came to Hermeskeil. The Lufthansa Viscount D-ANAM, for example, was used for training purposes at Hamburg Airport after being withdrawn from service, before moving to the Hunsrück in 1976.
• The end of the NVA. After reunification in 1990, many aircraft of the East German National People’s Army were surplus because they didn’t fit into NATO structures. A large share of the MiGs, Sukhois and Mil helicopters in Hermeskeil come from these stocks.

Added to this are aircraft from British, French, American and Swedish stocks. The result is a site where an F-4 Phantom stands next to a MiG-23 – an image that existed only in war games during the Cold War.

The airliners: pioneer era within reach

For spotters who otherwise collect registrations of A320s and 737-800s, the airliner row in Hermeskeil is the most interesting part. Here stand the ancestors of today’s air travel – types with which the jet and turboprop era got started in the first place.

The registrations in the table come from spotter documentation and specialist sites; which paint scheme an aircraft currently wears can change after a repaint.

The Super Constellation D-ALIN

The Lockheed L-1049G with the registration D-ALIN is the most emotional piece in the collection for German aviation fans. The aircraft was delivered to the newly founded Lufthansa in 1955 – the year the airline resumed flight operations. It stayed in service until 1967. After that, Lufthansa employees saved it from being scrapped, and it stood for more than a decade at Hamburg Airport. In 1980 it was dismantled and brought to Hermeskeil by road.

The Super Constellation is often associated with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s trip to Moscow in September 1955, in which the delegation flew on aircraft of this type. Whether D-ALIN in particular was among them cannot be clearly established from the available sources. What is undisputed: Anyone who wants to understand the beginnings of today’s Lufthansa and thus of the Lufthansa Group stands here in front of an original from its first year of operation.

VC10 and Comet: British jet pioneers

The VC10 G-ARVF flew for British BOAC from 1963 and was later sold to the government of the United Arab Emirates. In 1981 it landed at Saarbrücken-Ensheim and was then brought to Hermeskeil by road – a transport that is hard to imagine for a four-engine jet of this size. Typical of the VC10 are the four engines at the rear and the tall T-tail structure, a design that has disappeared from airliners of this size today.

The Comet 4C stands for the type with which the world’s first civil jet airliner took to the air in 1949. The early Comet versions became famous through a series of accidents that taught aviation a great deal about metal fatigue. The 4C is a later, significantly reworked version. If you compare the design language with that of a modern A350, you see how far the road led from engines integrated into the wing root to today’s nacelles under the wings.

The Concorde that never flew

The landmark of the Flugausstellung can be seen from the road: a Concorde with the typical slender delta wing. It is not an original, however, but a replica. According to the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), it was enlarged compared with the original so that it has room for a café. Sources give differing accounts of the building material.

According to the museum, up to 150 guests sit inside, and they are served by “stewardesses.” For a break between two tours, that is a fairly unique experience – and a photo subject that is missing from no Hermeskeil picture.

If you’re interested in the real Concorde: The story of the supersonic airliner of British Airways and Air France is told in the article Concorde – the story of a legend. An original Concorde in Germany can be found in the museum group of Speyer and Sinsheim.

The Cold War on one site

Military aircraft take up most of the area. What makes Hermeskeil special is the mix: Combat jets from NATO countries and from the Warsaw Pact stand within sight of each other.

A special piece is the Tornado prototype P.06, which according to spotter documentation carries the British serial number XX948. It differs in details from the later production aircraft and was a test bed for the onboard cannon.

The Antonov An-26 stands out for its unusual paint: It wears the colors of Cuba’s Aerocaribbean, even though it comes from East German military stocks. Spotter sources suspect an allusion to operations in Africa in which East German and Cuban An-26s flew side by side – this is not documented.

Helicopters of all sizes

The helicopter collection is worth the trip all by itself. It ranges from the Bell 47 with its characteristic glass bubble to the Mil Mi-6A, which in its day was considered the largest helicopter in the world. In between stand, among others, the Bell UH-1D and Bo 105 from Bundeswehr stocks, Mi-1, Mi-2, Mi-4, Mi-8, Mi-14 and Mi-24 from the East, a Sikorsky Skycrane, a Kamov Ka-26 as well as British types like the Wessex, Whirlwind, Wasp and the Westland Scout that was newly added in 2023.

If in your everyday spotting you mostly see H145s of the police and rescue services, the Mi-6A is a good yardstick for what helicopter building once meant.

The halls: from Blériot to gliding

In the four halls things are smaller, but no less interesting. The oldest aircraft in the collection is, according to ERIH, a Blériot XI – the type with which Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in 1909. Added to this are gliders like the Spatz, Mü 13 and Rhönlerche, flying wings like the Horten XV, light aircraft like the Piper Cub and Messerschmitt Bf 108, as well as a replica of the Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat glider and a Fokker triplane. A large engine collection shows what’s under the cowlings.

Photography in Hermeskeil: outdoor rules

Unlike in a pure indoor exhibition, you photograph mostly outdoors in Hermeskeil. That has advantages – lots of room, natural light, no hall lighting – and a few quirks.

Because you’re photographing parked aircraft here, much lighter gear is enough than at the airport fence. A standard zoom and a wide-angle lens cover almost everything. What you need in batteries and storage is in the gear checklist. And if weathered aircraft in large numbers fascinate you, the article on aircraft graveyards and boneyards is the right reading for the drive home.

Getting there and planning your visit

Hermeskeil is in the Hunsrück, in the Trier-Saarburg district. The exhibition grounds are northeast of the town on the B 327, the Hunsrückhöhenstraße, near the Reinsfeld interchange of the A 1 between Koblenz and Saarbrücken. By car the exhibition is easy to reach; by public transportation it gets considerably more awkward.

According to the website, the season runs from April 1 to November 1. It is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., including on holidays. New since 2026: The exhibition stays closed on Mondays unless it is a holiday. As of 2026 the website lists €15 admission for adults and €7 for children 4 to 14. Check times and prices before your visit, because both can change from season to season.

At the entrance you get a printed exhibition catalog with technical data and histories of the exhibits. For spotters who document registrations and aircraft histories, it is the best complement to your own photos.

Combining the museum with live traffic

There is no airline traffic right at the Flugausstellung. The nearest commercial airport is Frankfurt-Hahn, about 40 kilometers away, with modest passenger and cargo operations. Luxembourg Airport is also in the wider vicinity of the Hunsrück – home to Luxair and the cargo airline Cargolux with its Boeing 747 freighters.

If you’re planning a long spotting day, you can combine the museum with Frankfurt Airport: mornings among the rows in Hermeskeil, afternoons at the Zeppelinheim viewing platform. Long-haul aircraft like the 747-8 and A380 land there daily – the direct descendants of the four-engine jets that stand on the meadow in Hermeskeil. Check the runway direction in use beforehand so you stand at the right end of the airport. Be realistic about travel time; a day like this is ambitious.

Conclusion

The Flugausstellung Hermeskeil is not a polished showpiece museum, but a private collection grown over five decades with astonishing breadth. The Super Constellation, Comet, VC10 and Viscount tell the story of early commercial flight, MiGs and Phantoms that of the Cold War. Add helicopters, gliders and a Concorde in which you drink coffee.

For spotters, Hermeskeil is a place where you can “tick off” types that vanished from the airspace long ago – and a textbook of design forms that makes every later type identification at the fence easier. If you’re searching specifically for rarities, you’ll find more ideas in the article Spotting rare aircraft.