Rentschler Field: From Test Runway to Football Stadium
Near Hartford, Connecticut
The ground beneath Pratt and Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field has a longer story than most sports venues. Before tens of thousands of fans gathered here for UConn Huskies football, this seventy-five-acre site in East Hartford was one of the most important airstrips in the country, and what happened here shaped the engines that would win a world war.
The field opened in the early nineteen thirties as a private corporate airstrip for Pratt and Whitney, the Hartford-based aircraft engine maker. Engineers tested their latest engine designs here, and Hamilton Standard propellers hummed through the air above this ground. In those years, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart both landed at Rentschler Field. During the Second World War, the strip became a military airfield, its runways carrying the weight of a nation mobilizing for global conflict.
The name itself honors Frederick Rentschler, the aviation pioneer who founded Pratt and Whitney in nineteen twenty-five and whose company became one of the dominant forces in American aerospace. When jet travel reshaped the industry and this particular runway fell quiet, United Technologies, Pratt and Whitney's parent company, donated the seventy-five acres to the State of Connecticut in nineteen ninety-nine.
Construction on the stadium began in October of two thousand, and the facility opened in the summer of two thousand and three, when the Huskies defeated Indiana thirty-four to ten in the inaugural game. At the time it was the first stadium built primarily for a Division One college football program to open in the new century.
The venue was renamed Pratt and Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in two thousand and fifteen, restoring the aviation heritage to the front of the sign. So the next time the Huskies take the field here, they do so on ground where Amelia Earhart once rolled to a stop, above a runway that once tested the engines of a nation at war.
