Ten months after a windstorm tore a hole in its roof, the Tillamook Air Museum is open again, thanks to a Utah nonprofit that bought the World War II blimp hangar the museum resides in for $1.

The Port of Tillamook Bay, which owned the hangar, faced millions in repairs it couldn’t afford and voted in May against fixing it.

The nonprofit Vintage Aviation Museum reopened the Tillamook Air Museum on Oct. 29. Now the group has to patch the roof and continue restoration of the building, which is more than 80 years old.

The building

The Tillamook Air Museum is home to all kinds of aircraft-related artifacts, and it’s housed in an artifact itself — a wooden hangar about 1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide.

“We like to call it history housing history,” said Christian Gurling, the museum’s director and curator.

The Navy built two hangars — Hangar A and Hangar B — for Naval Air Station Tillamook. Metal was scarce during the war, so the hangars were made almost entirely of wood.

Builders used about 3 million board feet of Douglas fir from Washington and Oregon for Hangar B alone.

“That’s enough lumber in this hangar alone to build about 280 three-bedroom homes,” Gurling said

Blimps based there patrolled the Washington, Oregon and California coasts for Japanese submarines.

After the war, lumber, plywood, planing mills and other businesses leased the hangars, drawn by more than 7 acres under one roof.

In May 1992, the Port of Tillamook Bay opened an air museum in Hangar B. A fire destroyed Hangar A that August.

The damage

In December 2025, a windstorm ripped a roughly 200-by-30-foot hole in the southeast corner of the hangar’s roof above an area used for storage. No aircraft or exhibits were damaged.

Gurling woke up the next morning to a photo of the hole that a local business had posted.

“At the time, it looked like a much smaller hole than it actually was,” Gurling said. “It wasn’t until I drove out to work and saw the magnitude of the damage that it really hit home what had happened.”

Gurling, who has worked at the museum since 2007, called the closure heartbreaking. He said it was hard to watch visitors pull up, look at the damage and leave, without getting inside.

For months, the port weighed whether it could afford to reopen the museum. Roof repair estimates ran $2.5 million to $6.5 million, and the estimated cost to fully restore the building was at least $20 million.

In May, the port’s board voted against repairing the hangar. The board agreed only to remove the hanging debris, and then began taking offers from buyers.

The $1 sale

Sean O’Brien is president of the Vintage Aviation Museum, the nonprofit in Spanish Fork, Utah.

He was familiar with the hangar and what it meant to the Tillamook community. Nearly 20 years ago, while living in Tillamook, he volunteered as a docent at the museum.

“When I learned of what happened with the storm of December of last year, I felt the need and the pull, if you will, to try and step up and do something to save that building,” O’Brien said, “because it looked like there weren’t a lot of options for saving the building, much less being able to keep an air museum there.”

A contractor for 38 years, O’Brien builds hangars at airports across the country and has experience restoring historic buildings.

O’Brien said he sent the port a proposal in February for the Vintage Aviation Museum to take over, three months before the board voted against repairs.

The Vintage Aviation Museum eventually bought Hangar B for $1 and bought the port’s aircraft, artifacts and equipment for $20. The port kept the land and gave the nonprofit a long-term lease.

“We told the port that we felt that was fair because of the significant investment over the next several years that we would be making,” O’Brien said, “not only in that building, but also the community.”

O’Brien said he hopes to figure out preliminary repair costs by early December and the cost of reroofing the whole hangar a few months after that.

He said private ownership will make the work faster and cheaper than it would have been under the port, which is a public agency.

“We need to stick with as close to the original design as possible,” O’Brien said.

Hangar B is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, so O’Brien said state preservation officials must approve any changes to its design.

Crews finished removing the hanging debris Oct. 22. The work cost $542,000, with FEMA covering 75% and the port paying the rest, the Tillamook Headlight Herald reported.

There’s still a hole in the roof. O’Brien said it could be patched by mid-November, though no date is set. The area beneath it is fenced off, and O’Brien said crew safety comes first. He wants workers to “go home to their families every night.”

The reopening

The museum celebrated its reopening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 29.

Gurling said seeing families come through the doors again makes the work worthwhile.

Staff spent two to three months packing up the museum after the storm. Putting it back took three weeks, with more than 80 volunteers turning out for one October work party.

“I can’t thank the volunteers enough. They really helped get us back up and running,” Gurling said.

Staff members volunteered their time until the Vintage Aviation Museum hired them.

O’Brien said the bulk of the nonprofit’s collection will move from Utah to Tillamook. But the Spanish Fork museum will stay open.

He said the aircraft and artifacts “are going to have to be moved by road, and it’s just gonna take time.”

O’Brien said the nonprofit will end the lumber and RV storage in the hangar, as well as the subleases to other businesses.

O’Brien wants to draw aviation buffs and people who just want to be entertained. He said the goal is to make the museum “an aviation Disneyland, if you will,” a place where visitors “leave feeling happy, excited, they want to keep coming back.”

Gurling said the museum is already building momentum along those lines.

“When I read the reviews of people,” he said, “and I see a mother who says ‘You know, I brought my 6-year-old in, and I thought they would be absolutely bored to tears, and I literally had to drag him out of the museum,’ it makes me realize what a great job we’ve done in developing this museum.”

The Tillamook Air Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Updates on repairs and events are posted at tillamookair.com.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/11/11/one-dollar-sale-saved-tillamook-air-museum-now-restoration-starts/