Caernarfon Airworld Aviation Museum

Date of visit: March 2022.

Caernarfon Air Museum building
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Caernarfon Airworld Aviation Museum which opened in 1988 is located on the airfield of the former RAF Llandwrog, south‑west of Caernarfon, Gwynedd, North Wales.

RAF Llandwrog opened in January 1941 as a RAF Bomber Command airfield to train gunners, radio operators and navigators. Due to the high number of aircraft crashing on training flights in the nearby mountains of Snowdonia, it was at RAF Llandwrog in 1943 that the RAF Mountain Rescue Service was formed by Flt Lt George Graham and a display is dedicated to this in the museum. RAF Llandwrog closed in 1946 after the end of the Second World War.

After the war the airfield was used as a storage dump for chemical weapons recovered from Germany. Approximately 71,000 bombs containing the nerve agent Tabun were stored in the open on the airfield until 1954 when they were loaded aboard vessels for disposal at sea during Operation Sandcastle.

In 1969 the airfield reopened for civilian use and remains in operation today as Caernarfon Airport. It houses the Wales Air Ambulance, H.M. Coastguard helicopters operated by Bristow Group, a flying school and Babcock International aerospace, defence and security company.

The Airworld Aviation Museum which operates today as a Charitable Trust has an impressive collection of aircraft and aviation memorabilia housed in a purpose‑built building. As the collections are squeezed into a relatively small area, photography is difficult and trying to capture a totally unobstructed image of an aircraft is virtually impossible. For many of the exhibits I had to use a Canon 16‑35mm lens. This is a lens I try to avoid using at the shorter focal lengths to prevent too much distortion of the subject, but at this museum it was necessary.

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Bleriot XI (replica)
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