If you only know aviation museums as hangars full of old planes, a recent roundup of the world's best makes a compelling case that they're far stranger and more fun than that. Consider the RF-84K Thunderflash at Denver's Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum: a 'parasite' fighter designed to hook onto a trapeze beneath a B-36 bomber mid-flight, detach for its mission, then reconnect in the air. The idea lasted just two years before jet technology made it obsolete — but the oddball aircraft, one of more than 60 at the museum, remains a highlight. The museum also tells a local story: the 1920s Alexander Eaglerock, built by a film studio's teenage chief engineer Al Mooney, briefly made Colorado America's biggest airplane producer.

Across the Atlantic, IWM Duxford in Cambridgeshire holds the only SR-71 Blackbird outside the United States — a spy plane capable of Mach 3.2 — and runs airshows including the Battle of Britain Air Show. Thrill-seekers can book flights in a Spitfire, Hurricane, Mustang or the world's only airworthy Blenheim, or take an open-cockpit Tiger Moth tour over London or Cambridge.

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., anchors the American scene with the original 1903 Wright Flyer, Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis and the De Havilland Comet, the first jet airliner. Its Udvar-Hazy Center near Chantilly, Virginia, adds more hangar space, and the collection goes beyond machines — including Anne Noggle's striking portraits of World War II women pilots. In Oregon, the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum is home to the Hughes H-4 Hercules, the 'Spruce Goose' and the largest seaplane ever built. Its silvery skin is partly a bluff: wartime aluminium restrictions meant the giant frame is birch, shaped by workers who literally ironed wood veneer into form.

The list stretches worldwide: the Royal Flying Doctor Service museum in Alice Springs, which chronicles Australia's remote aeromedical lifeline; Red Bull Hangar-7 in Salzburg; Poland's Aviation Museum in Krakow; Le Bourget in Paris; Aerospace Bristol; and Beijing's China Aviation Museum with over 200 aircraft. Ottawa's Canada Aviation and Space Museum preserves the last surviving piece of the CF-105 Avro Arrow, the Mach 2 interceptor cancelled by Prime Minister Diefenbaker in 1959. There's even a pre-flight chapter: da Vinci's Codex on the Flight of Birds sits in Turin's Royal Library, and Florence's Leonardo Interactive Museum displays models of his ornithopter concepts that researchers — including a Johns Hopkins team — still study for quiet-drone design. Back in the US, Pima in Tucson, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Atlanta's Delta Flight Museum, Oshkosh's EAA Museum and the Sullenberger Aviation Museum at Charlotte Douglas Airport round out a serious plane-spotting road trip.