Museums and Palaces

As you go round the rooms of this unusual museum, you can learn about the history of military and civil aviation in Portugal and get to know the Portuguese pioneers of the conquest of the air.

Aircraft, engines, flight equipment, photographs and around 600 1/70-scale model aeroplanes illustrate humankind's oldest dream: to fly. It is an ideal place to take your children to see life-sized replicas or real aircraft that still fly, from Santos Dumont's "Demoiselle" (1908), which weighed only 118 Kg, to the first Portuguese Air Force plane to reach the speed of sound in horizontal flight.

We single out three important dates in Portuguese aviation:
1922 - The pilot Artur Sacadura Cabral and navigator Carlos Viegas Gago Coutinho made the first crossing of the South Atlantic from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, where they arrived in good shape after a rough journey. For this feat they used two Fairey III aircraft, the "Lusitânia" and the "Santa Cruz", with which they completed the journey. Gago Coutinho later died in the North Sea in 1924, flying from Amsterdam to Lisbon.

1924 - On 7th April, Sarmento de Beires and Brito Pais, joined in Tunis by the mechanic Manuel Gouveia, set out for Macao in a Breguet XVI, called the "Pátria". The journey across Asia was fraught with incidents and the aircraft had to be replaced in India by the "Pátria II". Caught up in a violent typhoon near Macao, the fragile craft landed near Hong Kong. But the feat of linking Portugal to its furthest possessions in the east had been accomplished.

1934 - On board a De Havilland, the "Dilly", Humberto Cruz and the mechanic António Lobato crossed North Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia to Timor, in a remarkable pioneering journey to Portugal's furthest territory. The two men covered 42,750 Kms, flying for 268 hours 25 minutes.