Aerospace Center for Excellence (Florida Air Museum)

The Florida Air Museum, a division of the Aerospace Center for Excellence, will digitize and preserve 11,000 paper schematics and blueprints of aircraft, airframe, powerplant components, and armament designed and produced by Howard Hughes and his engineering team. The schematics are currently housed at the museum, but their fragile state prohibits public access. The digitization and preservation project will enable the museum to procure a large document scanner to capture still images of the oversized schematics, archival materials to properly house the schematics, and equipment to organize and catalogue the assets. The project will yield optimal preservation and access to the collection for museum patrons, aviation historians, aircraft engineers, and the public via curated digital kiosk and online archive.