Flugwerft Schleißheim

Most aircraft that spotters photograph will be history in a few decades. Flugwerft Schleißheim shows how that history began – and everything built in between that nobody sees in the sky anymore. The museum is the aviation branch of the Deutsches Museum and lies north of Munich, on an airfield where aircraft were already flying in 1912.

A museum on a real airfield

Many aviation museums are in industrial halls or exhibition grounds. Schleißheim is different: the exhibition uses the buildings of an airfield that has existed for over a hundred years and is still in operation. The Deutsches Museum describes the complex as one of the oldest airfield complexes in Germany.

The ensemble consists of three parts that you walk through one after another on a visit:

• The commandant’s building is the oldest building. It was built from 1912 as the administrative seat of the new airfield, at the time flanked by two wooden aircraft hangars. Today, it deals with the beginnings of flight.
• The hangar hall (Werfthalle) was built toward the end of World War I to house and repair aircraft. The museum takes its name from it.
• The new exhibition hall was added in 1992 with the museum’s opening. Most of the collection stands here, and gliders hang from the ceiling.

Outside, the airfield adjoins. Unlike a pure museum site, the field is active: according to the Deutsches Museum, the Federal Police flying squadron and several flying clubs use it. That is no substitute for a commercial airport, but it explains why helicopters and light aircraft occasionally pass over the heads of museum visitors.

A hundred years of airfield history in brief

The site’s history reads like a cross-section of German aviation. In 1912, the grounds south of the Schleißheim palaces became the base of the newly founded Bavarian flying corps. In World War I, pilots, observers and gunners were trained here, and the airfield grew with halls and quarters.

In the 1920s, scheduled mail and passenger flights departed from Schleißheim. But the Oberwiesenfeld, closer to the city, was developed into Munich’s actual airport, and Schleißheim remained a training site: from 1927, the Deutsche Verkehrsfliegerschule (German commercial flying school) trained pilots here. In the Nazi era, the airfield became a Luftwaffe air base; in 1944, air raids caused severe destruction, including among the civilian population.

After 1945, the US Army took over the site and stationed transport helicopters here until 1968. From 1958, the Bundeswehr army aviators joined them. When they left in 1981, military flight operations ended – and the historic buildings began to decay. In the 1980s, supporters campaigned to save the buildings from demolition. After restoration, Flugwerft opened at the site in 1992 as the “Museum für Luft- und Raumfahrt” (museum of aviation and space).

The collection has grown continuously since then. Some milestones from the museum’s chronicle:

For you as a visitor, this means one thing above all: the exhibition is not static. With the modernization of the Deutsches Museum on Munich’s Museum Island, aircraft have moved, and in Schleißheim, too, things are rearranged from time to time. At the time of this article, the museum itself points to rearrangement work in the halls.

What stands in the halls

The collection is best approached by theme groups. The museum counts 74 aircraft, plus engines and models. The following overview gives examples, not a complete list – which aircraft stands where can change.

Research aircraft: the quiet stars

Part of the collection comes from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The VFW 614 ATTAS is a converted regional jet used to simulate the flight behavior of other aircraft – a flying test laboratory. According to DLR, the LFU 205 served for about fifty years in research on aerodynamics and construction methods. And the high-performance glider DG 300 was a reference aircraft for three decades, against which the flight performance of numerous other gliders was measured.

Such aircraft are appealing to spotters because they show how much work goes into a new type before it even lands in an airline fleet. A VFW 614 is also a piece of German civil aviation history: the small jet with engines mounted above the wing was built in only very small numbers.

The Fokker D.VII and its detective story

A nice example that a museum is never finished: the exhibited 1918 Fokker D.VII wears German paint. According to a DLR report, however, investigations with Dutch partners since 2020 have shown that the aircraft originally flew with the Dutch naval aviators. Oddities in the paint had already been noticed in earlier work. You know exactly this kind of provenance research from spotting – except that here it is not about yesterday’s registration but about an airframe from over a hundred years ago.

The glass-walled restoration workshop

What sets Flugwerft apart from many other museums is the restoration workshop behind glass. Through the glass front, you watch as aircraft are dismantled, conserved and reassembled. Instead of a finished exhibit, you see wings on trestles, open fuselages and components being examined one by one.

The most prominent project of recent years is the original Lilienthal glider. According to DLR, only four surviving originals exist worldwide. The restoration began in 2020, with the aim of learning as much as possible about the construction while changing as little original material as possible. How far the work has come is something you only see on site – and that is exactly what makes repeat visits interesting.

Photography in the hall: different rules than at the fence

At the airport, you fight sun position, heat shimmer and fence mesh. In the hall, the opponents are different: mixed lighting, tightly placed exhibits and visitors in the frame. With a few tricks, you still get clean shots.

What else you should pack – batteries, memory cards, a cleaning cloth – is in the equipment checklist for plane spotters. For the hall, you usually need much less than for a day at the fence; you hardly need a heavy telephoto lens here.

Museum and airport in one day

Flugwerft is in the north of Munich, in the same direction as Munich Airport. That makes a combination obvious: the halls in Schleißheim in the morning, live traffic at the visitors’ hill in the afternoon. There you see, among other things, the Lufthansa fleet at the Munich hub, from the A320neo to the A350-900, and guests such as the A380 of Emirates.

The order has a practical reason: the halls are independent of light, the airport is not. If you check beforehand when the sun is favorable for your spot at the hill, you can schedule the museum visit before or after accordingly. How that works is explained in the article on sun position planning. And since wind decides the runway direction in use at the airport, a look at the article Understanding the runway direction in use is also worthwhile.

Conclusion

Flugwerft Schleißheim is not a place for registration hunters but for everyone who wants to know where aviation comes from. The historic airfield, the hangar hall from World War I and a collection full of one-of-a-kind pieces make it one of the most exciting aviation museums in Germany. If you are just starting the hobby, a visit also sharpens your eye for designs and details – useful for any later type identification at the fence, as described in the beginner’s guide.

Don’t expect an airliner exhibition. Expect VTOL aircraft, combat jets, research aircraft and gliders – and a workshop where you see history in the making.