The Air Capital's Art Deco Crown
Near Wichita, Kansas
By nineteen twenty-eight, Wichita had earned a title no other city could claim: Air Capital of the World. Four aircraft companies, Swallow, Travel Air, Cessna, and Stearman, were operating here simultaneously, and their combined output exceeded that of any other city in the United States. The Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce made it official that year. Wichita was building a quarter of the nation's planes.
The city decided its airport should announce that fact. The new terminal, designed by architect Glen Thomas and opened in nineteen thirty-five, was built in the Art Deco style, a sweeping horizontal building with a control tower added in nineteen forty-one. It was one of the largest examples of Art Deco architecture to survive in south-central Kansas. Aviation luminaries Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart passed through its doors. So did Howard Hughes and Fred Astaire, because Wichita in the nineteen thirties was a place where the celebrity worlds of aviation and entertainment intersected.
The terminal served commercial passengers until nineteen fifty-four, when a larger airport was built to the west. The building sat neglected for decades before reopening in nineteen ninety as the Kansas Aviation Museum, which now houses roughly forty historically significant aircraft in and around the old terminal.
World War Two was the pivot that made Wichita's aviation industry enormous. Boeing built the B-Twenty-Nine Superfortress here, and Wichita plants accounted for roughly twelve percent of all American aircraft production by the war's end. After the war, Boeing stayed, producing the B-Forty-Seven Stratojet and later the B-Fifty-Two Stratofortress, the same aircraft still flying combat patrols today. Cessna's Nineteen Seventy-Two model became the best-selling aircraft in aviation history.
The museum sits at the southeast corner of McConnell Air Force Base, where the legacy of production meets the legacy of operations. Climb the old control tower and you can see both runways, a century of flight laid out beneath you.
