If you try to check your coat at Brussels’ Air Museum, you will inevitably meet Monsieur Alfred David. Instead of doing something useful like exchanging your coat for a numbered ticket, he will politely present his card and wait expectantly.

            It’s an over-sized card with a picture in one corner of a King Penguin, Poised-beak up, wings back-as if on the edge of a 10-metre diving board. To one side, the presenter’s name is written and beneath it his other occupation (I suspected there had to be another one: he had still not made a move towards my coat), curator of the Museum of the Penguin.

I looked at him again, lost for words, suddenly able to excuse the alcoholic cloud that surrounded him as the result of too regular work with preserving fluid. Eventually, I managed: “A penguin museum. How many penguins do you actually have?” The answer came straight back: “One thousand eight-hundred and sixty-four.” I thought my French was failing me and I’d been given the year the museum had been founded, but no, in Geer on the outskirts of Brussels in Belgium there is a museum curated by M David containing 1,864 stuffed penguins.

            Once this had been verified, only one thing really remained to be elucidated. “Penguins don’t fly; what are you doing in an air museum?” This pedantic point didn’t ruffle any feathers; it had obviously been raised before. “By the time you’re finished here, you’ll be happy to see anything that doesn’t fly.”

            At the first exhibit, I did wonder if M David would be proved right. Various twisted bits of a German Heinkel 177 that had crashed into the North Sea in 1944 rested on a low platform. Whether this was designed as a humbling experience prior to experiencing man’s, and indeed woman’s (there is some interesting woolly underwear on display designed specifically for the latter) eventual success in getting into the air, staying there and then coming down gently, or an example of the famous Belgian sense of humour,  I never discovered. The fact that the largest piece of wreckage is a barnacle-encrusted landing wheel and that the name of the craft was Grief lend weight, perhaps, to the second interpretation.

            After this salutary introduction, the museum-a large, sunny hanger containing over 80 flying machines of all ages-gets more cheerful and manages to demonstrate elegantly, as anybody who flies regularly will no doubt be very glad to learn, that humankind has become quite successful at flying.

            If we discount parachutes and man carrying kites, the museum demonstrates how it all began way back in 1783 when a sheep, a cock and a duck were ceremonially borne aloft in a hot-air balloon in front of the King and Queen of France.

            Reassured that the animals survived (don’t laugh; we shot a dog and several monkeys into orbit before venturing there ourselves), the Marquis d’ Arlandes de Rozier was quick to jump into the wickerwork basket. Despite his heavyweight title he rose to about 1,000 metres and covered some three kilometers before descending.

            The trouble with balloons, as even the Swiss couple, Parley and Egg, who designed one with oars discovered, is that they are lessthan suitable for scheduled services: the Los Angeles flight, for example, is likely to end up in Moscow if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction. So the cigar-shaped, propeller-equipped dirigible was born.

            It is unfortunate that these machines, known later as airships and then even more infamously as Zeppelins, made such spectacular photographs when they caught fire, because they generally offered quite a civilized aeronautical experience: coffee from thermos flasks, etc. But they did little to satisfy the human craving for real, that is, heavier -than-air, flight.

            Excepting winged steam-engines that landed upside down after hopping 32 metres and such like, this great grail was finally attained by the two Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who, on December 17, 1903, got the appropriately named Flyer into the air for just one second short of a minute.

            From then on, as the Brussels museum demonstrates, it was very fast forward. Under an elegant Caravelle airliner hung from the ceiling, just about every imaginable type of aircraft is displayed. At the rustic end of the spectrum, there are unlikely looking objects, such as a charming 1914 Maurice Farman with a propeller at the back and an undercarriage of pram wheels, held together with sticky tape. It weighs in at 955 kg, had a maximum range of 380 km, a maximum speed of 106km per hour and could just reach an altitude of 3,000 metres.

            At the Killer-shark end of the exhibition is a grey McDonnell RF4C Phantom, which it should be noted, for the purposes of comparison at least, weighs 26,308kg, has a range of 2,815km, and is capable of 2,348km per hour and an altitude of 28,105 metres. And this represents just 44 years of aeronautical progress.

            There’s a lot in between of course: a 1917 blood-red Fokker triplane, the likes of which I hadn’t realized actually existed outside cartoonists’ imaginations; an Alouette helicopter. As elegant as its name: an interesting late-model Spitfire: some early jets and much more, including, rather cheerlessly, alarge number of red bombs standing on their tail-fins.

            If I didn’t find some of my personal heroes celebrated-the Chinese emperor Shun, for example, who is said to have escaped from a burning tower around 2250 BC by using two reed hats as a parachute: or the unknown coachman chivvied by his boss, Sir George Cayley, into successfully piloting a prototype glider off a Yorkshire hill in 1852; or the Frenchman G Trouve, credited with the invention of an ornithopter (an aircraft with flapping wings) powered by gunpowder in 1870

– it is because there is so much in the museum that I couldn’t find them. It covers not just aircraft but also the men and women who flew them, the records that they broke, the jobs planes are now used for and the associated complexities of meteorology, satellite observation, and so on.

          After spending an aftermoon mentally in the air, did I feel the need to visit M David’s collection of flightless penguins? Not at all: sad creatures, I decided. Not really worthy of being called birds.