Al Mahatta Fort, Aviation museum in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Al Mahatta Fort is a fortified rest house built in 1932 in central Sharjah, with a crenellated perimeter wall enclosing a courtyard and the rooms that housed Imperial Airways passengers and staff. It now holds the Al Mahatta Museum, whose hangar displays the Handley Page HP42 aircraft Hanno and the de Havilland Comet, alongside fuel and oil equipment and a map of the route's landing stops.

Al Mahatta Fort was built by the Ruler of Sharjah, Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi, under a June 1932 agreement with the British government on behalf of Imperial Airways, securing him 800 rupees a month for landing rights. The fortified rest house for crew and passengers was finished only in 1937, five years after the first flight landed. The Royal Air Force used it during World War II and the Trucial Oman Scouts later; it then served briefly as a hotel, a police station and a school before opening as the Al Mahatta Museum in 2000.

The name Al Mahatta means "the station" in Arabic, after Sharjah's role as an overnight stop on Imperial Airways' route between Britain and India. The museum keeps the first cinema in the Arabian Gulf region, set up in 1945 for British camp soldiers, where silent films were projected onto a wall and viewers sat on kerosene tins half-filled with sand.

Al Mahatta Museum occupies the former air station in central Sharjah, a short walk from the Sharjah Creek waterfront and the Heart of Sharjah district. The museum is closed on Fridays, so plan a visit on another day of the week. The historic rest-house rooms and the hangar are entered on foot, and the older doorways and stairs are low and narrow in places.

The museum keeps the first cinema in the Arabian Gulf region, set up in 1945 for British camp soldiers, where silent films were projected onto a wall and viewers sat on kerosene tins half-filled with sand. A newer cinema was built between 1949 and 1959 by the Royal Air Force stationed in Sharjah.