Wichita and the Air Capital of the World

In the nineteen twenties, the aviation industry was scattered across makeshift workshops in garages, barns, and improvised factory buildings wherever ambitious mechanics with access to capital happened to set up shop. Wichita did not seem, at first, like an obvious place for an aviation center. It was a mid-sized Kansas city that had been a cattle railhead, then an oil boomtown, then a regional farm service center. It had no particular advantage in aeronautics.

What it had was a concentration of entrepreneurs, workers trained in mechanical precision through the oil-field equipment industry, and a climate with enough flyable days per year to make testing and training practical. It had Clyde Cessna, who had been teaching himself to fly on open fields east of town since nineteen eleven and who cofounded the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita in nineteen twenty-five. It had Walter Beech, who cofounded Travel Air with Cessna, then left to start the Beech Aircraft Company in nineteen thirty-two. It had Lloyd Stearman, who also cofounded Travel Air, then moved to Stearman Aircraft, which Boeing eventually acquired and turned into the factory that built over ten thousand Stearman biplane trainers during World War Two.

By nineteen twenty-nine, Wichita was producing more aircraft by number than any other city in the United States. The Chamber of Commerce called it the Air Capital of the World. The name stuck, and for a period it was accurate. The companies that built it, Cessna, Beechcraft, Stearman, and later Learjet and others, were not subsidiaries of eastern corporations. They were locally founded, locally led, and they built a skilled manufacturing workforce that persisted through the Depression and into the war production surge.

The wartime contracts transformed Wichita's scale entirely. Boeing's Wichita plant, operating the former Stearman factory and new facilities, produced over fifteen hundred B-twenty-nine Superfortress bombers during World War Two. Among the bombers that changed the war, several variants were assembled at plants across the country from components and designs refined in Wichita.

The aviation industry in Wichita contracted after the general aviation liability crisis of the nineteen eighties, which drove both Cessna and Beechcraft to cut production sharply. Both companies survived. Cessna still builds aircraft in Wichita. Spirit AeroSystems, which grew out of Boeing's Wichita operations, remains one of the city's largest employers. The Air Capital label is no longer unchallenged, but it is not wrong.