It’s a “gift to passengers”, says Shannon Airport. The world’s largest private diecast model aircraft exhibition was unveiled there this week and certainly adds colour and intrigue to the customer journey. Jason Holland reports.

Passengers at Shannon Airport are being invited to share in one man’s life-long fascination with aviation in a new permanent public exhibition.

Shannon Group, which operates the airport in the west of Ireland (and which was the birthplace of duty free in 1947), has officially opened the world’s largest private diecast model aircraft exhibition there.

The collection comprises 2,300 diecast model aircraft, with over 1,500 of them now on display and the rest to be rotated over time.

Retired Limerick man Michael Kelly, whose love affair with aircraft started as a boy at Shannon in the late 1950s, has assembled the hefty collection. He says it includes every popular plane to have flown as well as many lesser-known aircraft, right up to modern day versions.

The exhibition is located in the departures lounge. Some of the model aircraft are more than 40 years old, and all are 1:200 in scale with replicas of aircraft dating back to the 1940s.

Shannon Group Chairman Rose Hynes launched the exhibition on Tuesday (25 September). “Shannon is a place of homecomings and this is certainly among the best of them. This permanent display is a superb addition to the airport, a gift to passengers,” she says.

“Making our passengers happy, making their time in our airport go by easily, letting them know we care, is something we work hard at. This exhibition is an example of that.”

Michael Kelly says the exhibition launch is “a dream come true”. “I fell in love with aircraft in the late 1950s, the first minute my dad brought me to Shannon Airport to spot aircraft as they landed and took off,” he explains. “So, to have spent a lifetime assembling this collection and bring it back to where it all started is more than I could have hoped for.”

Among the exhibition highlights are a range of Concordes that perfected take-off ability at Shannon Airport as well as the Sunderland aircraft owned by Al Capone from the 1930s and the McDonnell Douglas DC6 – the oldest aircraft replicated in the collection.

Other aircraft model replicas are the Antonov 225, the world’s largest aircraft to fly commercially, which has also transited Shannon; the first Ryanair Boeing 737 aircraft; and the full Aer Lingus collection.

“We here at Shannon are delighted and proud to provide a home for such a wonderful and vast exhibition,” said Shannon Airport Director of Airport Operations Niall Maloney. “Michael, through his determination and love of aviation, has managed to amass the largest collection of model aircraft in the world. It’s in keeping with an airport that has probably broken more frontiers than any other of its size in the world.”