The Aviation Museum, one of the leading museums of this type in the world, was founded in 1957 with the Air Force Command (RV and PVO). Since 1989, it has been located in a modern building at the Belgrade airport. 2013, the Government of Serbia declared the Museum building a cultural monument.
The museum collections, which keep rich supporting documentation and archives from all periods and areas of aerospace history, make the most representative collection of domestic and foreign civil and military aviation and represent a significant source for a comprehensive overview of the development of aviation in our region from 1911 to the present.
The history of the museum begins in 1957 with the establishment of a special Department of History and the Yugoslav Aviation Museum at the Yugoslav Army Air Force Command. This department, which was soon renamed the Museum of Yugoslav Aviation, had the task of collecting, preserving, studying and presenting exhibits from all periods of development of Yugoslav aviation, from the appearance of the first ideas about the flight in our region to the modern age. Special attention has been paid to the earliest periods of the history of national aviation, the aviation pioneering age, and the Balkan and World War I.
After several changes in the location of the museum, which worked in the building of the Air Force Command in Zemun and the building of the Official House within the Old Belgrade Airport under Bežanijska Kosa, in late 1968 a decision was made to build a dedicated museum building. Among the several proposed locations of the new building of the Aeronautical Museum, the site within the airport complex "Belgrade" (today the airport "Nikola Tesla") was selected on the right side of the access road, 200 m from the entrance to the port airport building. This resulted in a conceptual connection between aviation history and theory with practice and significant enrichment of the content of the public airport complex. The choice of this location was influenced above all by the frequency of passenger movements as potential visitors to the museum, the financial cost-effectiveness of construction, as well as the museological justification based on the high quality interweaving of the airport ambience with the content and basic purpose of the facility.
