The Air Capital: When Wichita Built the World's Planes
Near Wichita, Kansas
On a January morning in nineteen twenty-five, four people gathered in a rented thirty-by-thirty-foot space behind the Broadview Hotel in downtown Wichita. The space had been a planing mill. What they were about to build there would eventually change how the world moved through the air.
Clyde Cessna, Lloyd Stearman, and Walter Beech formed the Travel Air Manufacturing Company, hiring Olive Ann Mellor as its office secretary and bookkeeper. She later married Beech and ran the company he founded. They began building aircraft from lightweight steel tubing, which they believed was safer than wood, because wood splintered on impact and killed pilots. By nineteen twenty-eight, Travel Air was the largest-volume aircraft manufacturer in the United States. One out of every four American-built airplanes that year came from Wichita. The Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce gave the city an official title: Air Capital of the World.
The partnership dissolved into three separate companies. Stearman founded his own firm in nineteen twenty-six; Beech and Olive Ann launched Beechcraft in nineteen thirty-two; Cessna struck out alone in nineteen twenty-seven. When Stearman's operation merged into Boeing in nineteen thirty-four, Wichita gained its largest employer. The companies grew and competed and built everything from mail planes to racing aircraft to the B-seventeen bomber, and when the Second World War arrived, the government called on Wichita to do something almost unimaginable.
Boeing's Wichita plant eventually covered two point three million square feet, the largest aircraft factory in the world at the time. At peak production in July of nineteen forty-five, the line was producing four point two B-twenty-nine Superfortresses per day. Wichita produced one thousand six hundred forty-four of the bombers before the war ended. Nearly half of all B-twenty-nines, the planes that carried the war to Japan's home islands, came from this city.
The Stearman biplane trainer, built here in Wichita, taught approximately half of all American military pilots who flew in the Second World War their first hours in the air. The Air Capital built the planes. The planes built the victory.
