The Carolinas Aviation Museum (now Sullenberger Aviation Museum) was our firm’s first and longest client (1999-2017). Beginning with our engagement by the museum founders, Floyd and Lois Wilson, in 1999, our firm provided professional planning and design expertise year over year as the museum worked to plan and expand their campus and collections around the historic 1937 WPA / Douglas Airport Hangar.

Tobin assisted the museum through many small and large-scale planning and design explorations, including the acquisition and placement of the “Miracle on the Hudson” Flight 1549, A321 aircraft, as they shaped strategies and goals for transforming their vision of a major aviation museum into reality.

Tobin produced:

• Feasibility studies to relocate and preserve the historic Holman Moody Hangar from the airport’s west side, as it was slated for demolition. The studies were successful, but the historic Holman Moody hangar was ultimately demolished to clear land for the Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s taxiway and runway expansion.

• Planning and technical documentation for the relocation and rehabilitation of a surviving historic Morris Field, base structure, which was added to the museum campus adjacent to the historic WPA-era hangar.

• Programmatic, Conceptual Planning & Design, and Financial pro-forma studies for major development of the museum campus in cooperation with Charlotte Douglas International Airport’s aviation leadership. Over multiple cycles, professional planning and design studies by Tobin were developed for four potential locations on and around airport grounds.

• Regrettably, as museum and airport leadership transitioned under a cloud of political and management controversies during 2013-16, Tobin’s 17+ year association with the museum ended.

• In 2024, the museum, renamed Sullenberger Aviation Museum, opened a new facility on the museum’s original historic campus, essentially following conceptual design work originally conceived and developed by Tobin.