Delta Flight Museum's collection offers visitors a journey through decades of airline history
October 16, 2025 | In the PressFrom CBS News (https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/delta-flight-museums-collection-offers-visitors-a-journey-through-decades-of-airline-history/)
In the shadow of the world's busiest airport sits one of the world's best collections of airline history.
While the Delta Flight Museum fills two historic hangars with a century of flight, there's so much more behind the closed doors of the museum's archives.
Stored away where visitors can't go, archivist Marie Force showed off some of the museum's uniform collection.
"This is one of my favorites—very colorful," Force said, showing off a closet full of avocado green, pimento red, and sunshine yellow outfits. "Northeast Airlines merged with Delta in 1972."
She said the museum has thousands of uniforms dating back decades.
"I think the earliest FA uniform is probably the 30s with Western, but with pilots, yeah, World War I," she said.
Remembering decades of Delta flights
Flight attendants Kay Carpenter and Susan Slater have worn many of those Delta uniforms. They began as flight attendants in the mid-1960s.
"You had to be unmarried, never been married. Your hair couldn't touch your collar," Slater recalled, laughing. "You had a weight restriction. And, back then, I think I weighed 103 pounds and I was 5-foot-2-and-a-half. I'm 5 feet now, barely, and not 103."
Carpenter called her time with the company "a wonderful adventure."
"I never dreamed that I would be here for this long. When I started, we had, like I said, we had just small airplanes," she said. "We flew to small cities, and now we fly to six continents. I'd never dream that I would be going some of the places that I've been."
Hidden treasures in the Delta Flight Museum
Beyond the uniforms, the archive is row after row of history. In one section, you can find Delta founder Collett E. Woolman's business card from the company's crop dusting days. In another section you can discover one of Force's "favorite little items," a matchbook from Chicago and Southern Air Lines, where the matches are decorated with flight attendants.
"They had just started flight attendant service," Force explained.
There's also a bevy of airplane tickets. Delta started flying passengers back in 1929.
"That first ticket was $90 round trip," Force said. "That would be for the full route, like, if you were flying from Dallas to Jackson."
Accounting for inflation, that would be slightly more than $2945 in 2025.
From matchboxes, to menus, to route maps, pilot wings, to playing cards, vintage glasses, and the mini bottles that filled them. It's a collection that Delta and the museum have been building for five decades, making an airline's history that keeps climbing to new heights.
You can see the museum's schedule and purchase tickets on its website.
