In the Aviation Pavilion we can find one of the most valuable military technical collections in Romania. The exhibition is formed of aircraft, engines, propellers, models but also some elements in connexion with the space flight of Dumitru Prunariu (14-22 may 1981).
The age of aeronautical pioneers is represented by the replicas of the Vuia I airplane, which completed the first mechanical flight on 18th March 1906, the Coandă 1910 airplane, the precursor of today’s jet-propelled airplanes, and the Vlaicu II airplane, built by Aurel Vlaicu in 1911 at the Arts and Crafts School and destroyed in the 31st August 1913 crash where the builder lost his life. Among the original elements of the Vlaicu II airplane, the steering wheel, a landing gear wheel and components of the 50 HP Gnome Rhône engine are on display.
For the Interwar and the Second World War periods, the museum exhibits to items which are part of the National Treasury: the Fleet 10 G faze 1 training and liaison airplane, and the Nardi FN-305 fighter training airplane, both built under licence in Romania. Next to them, the replica of the IAR-80 fighter airplane is placed, a fighter built at the IAR plant in Brașov, produced between 1939 and 1945. Also, original elements belonging to the No. 426 IAR-81 airplane shot down on 21st April 1945 in Slovakia are on display, airplane flown by Lieutenant Gheorghe Mociorniță.
The Cold War period is represented by Soviet aircraft, like the Iak-11, training airplane modified for air acrobatics in 1945 at the Pipera Works, and the sectioned MiG-19, supersonic jet fighter, entered in Romanian service in 1958, but also Romanian produced aircraft, such as the subsonic ground attack and fighter-bomber aircraft IAR-93, built within the YUROM Romanian-Yugoslav project, the IAR-316 B helicopter, built in Aérospatiale Alouette III French licence and the I.C.A. IS-28 M2 motoglider.
One of the best attractions of the museum is the space capsule with which cosmonauts Dumitru Prunariu and Leonid Popov returned to Earth at the end of the Soyuz 40 mission, as part of the Intercosmos Program.
