Mid-America Air Museum: A Hundred Aircraft in the Kansas Flatlands

On the edge of Liberal, Kansas, on ground where Army Air Forces pilots once trained to fly the B-Twenty-Four Liberator bomber, the largest aviation museum in Kansas now houses over one hundred aircraft under one roof. Liberal Army Air Field was established in nineteen forty-three and trained roughly one in four of the B-Twenty-Four bomber commanders in the country. After the war the field became the town's regional airport, and in nineteen eighty-eight the Mid-America Air Museum opened in a former Beech Aircraft production hangar.

Colonel Tom Thomas donated roughly fifty aircraft from his private collection to start it. Today the museum holds bombers, fighters, and trainers from World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam alongside commercially produced aircraft from Kansas manufacturers like Cessna and Beechcraft, plus experimental homebuilts and helicopters. Among the rarer pieces is a World War Two-era F Four U Corsair on loan from the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

It is an unlikely destination in a flat stretch of southwest Kansas, but one of the most complete collections of American aviation history between the coasts.