Indianapolis International Airport: Named for a Man Who Flew in Two Wars

Southwest of Indianapolis, just off the interstate, sits one of the busiest cargo airports in the world, the operational hub for FedEx's Midwest distribution and one of the top ten air cargo facilities in the United States. But the airport began as a modest city field in nineteen thirty-one, and for decades it carried the name of a man almost nobody today remembers.

Harvey Weir Cook was born in Wilkinson, Indiana, in eighteen ninety-two. He learned to fly early, joined the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, and in the skies over France became one of the handful of American pilots classified as aces, shooters credited with five or more aerial victories. Cook achieved seven. He came home a decorated officer and spent the following two decades in aviation, rising through the ranks of the Army Air Corps.

When the Second World War began, Cook, now well past the age of most combat pilots, went back into service and was assigned to the Pacific theater. On March twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-three, his P-thirty-nine aircraft went down over New Caledonia. He was fifty years old.

The Indianapolis Municipal Airport had opened in nineteen thirty-one on the city's southwest side, the first in the area with concrete runways. On March twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-four, the city renamed it Weir Cook Municipal Airport in his honor.

The name held until nineteen seventy-six, when the airport was expanded and rebranded Indianapolis International Airport. Veterans groups protested, and as a compromise, the new terminal building constructed in two thousand eight was named the Weir Cook Terminal.

The airport's signature today is its cargo operation, anchored by FedEx. But the name above the terminal entrance is a reminder that the first generation of American aviation was built by men like Cook, who taught themselves to fly, went to war with it, and never really came back.