The owner of one of the world’s largest collections of World War I- and World War II-era planes is selling off his aircraft and said he may have to close the Military Aviation Museum in Pungo. Gerald Yagen said on Monday he no longer can afford to keep the collection and, likely, the museum. The announcement shocked warplane enthusiasts and city officials who’d embraced the unique attraction in the city’s rural south.
“I’m subsidizing it heavily every year and my business no longer allows me to do that financially, and therefore I don’t have a solution for it,” Yagen said.
He said the four vocational trade schools he owned, including the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, Centura College and Tidewater Tech, have been acquired by another business. He declined to elaborate.
For years, Yagen, an avid pilot, has scoured the globe looking for old planes to refurbish and fly. In 2008, he opened the Military Aviation Museum and has expanded it several times, once to include a two-story 1941 British air tower that he had shipped piece-by-piece to Virginia Beach. In the past, Yagen has teamed up with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra to coordinate events featuring music and vintage planes, and has shown warplane-themed movies in a museum hangar.
Last spring, Yagen brought to Virginia Beach what is believed to be the world’s last flying de Havilland Mosquito, a Canadian-built fighter plane used by the British in World War II.
Virginia Beach museum owner selling plane collection