Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre has signed a special agreement with the Royal Air Force Museum.
The Memorandum of Understanding will establish a partnership that will allow the two centres to collaborate on programmes and shared learning opportunities.
They will work to share items from their respective collections, meaning a wider range of objects can be displayed at Montrose, while the story of the Angus base is told further afield.
MASHC chairman Ron Morris said it was a great step forward for the Montrose team.
He said: “The opportunity to be able to share collections and gain experience from this partnership will greatly enhance the quality of experience visitors to our museum will get.
“The impact of Montrose Air Station in the development of the RFC and RAF and the place it holds in aviation history is significant and relationships like this with the Royal Air Force Museum only strengthens our ability to draw visitors to Montrose to learn about the history and legacy of the RAF in Scotland.”
RAF Montrose became the first operational military aerodrome to be established in the UK in 1913 before closing permanently in 1952.
It trained pilots during the Second World War, including Commonwealth, Polish, Czech, American, Russian, Turkish, Free French and other Allied nationals.
RAF Museum chief executive Maggie Appleton said: “We are delighted to be strengthening our ties with Montrose Air Station Heritage Centre.
“At the RAF Museum it is our duty to share the RAF’s stories with the world through our archives, collections and exhibits.
“Further to that, we also see it as our responsibility to work with other organisations to both learn from them and share our own experience of running a museum and engaging with audiences.
“We look forward to this deepening of our relationship with our friends at MASHC.”
The Montrose museum dates back to April 1983, when a dedicated band of local enthusiasts took the first steps to ensuring that the history of the town’s air station would continue for generations to come.
In 1992, the trust purchased the former watch office and ground to create the Montrose Air Station Museum.
It emerged last week that part of the largely unaltered Major Burke’s Sheds will also become a section of the museum following a long-term agreement with Angus Council.
