Wichita: The Air Capital of the World

The same geography that made Wichita a cattle town in the eighteen seventies, flat, open, far from mountains, and blessed with clear sight lines in every direction, made it ideal for testing airplanes. The first aviation entrepreneurs figured that out in the nineteen teens, and by the mid-nineteen twenties, a cluster of aircraft manufacturers had gathered in Wichita that would define American aviation for a century.

Clyde Cessna founded the Cessna Aircraft Company in Wichita in nineteen twenty-seven. Walter Beech founded Beechcraft in nineteen thirty-two, and his first production model, the Beechcraft Model Seventeen Staggerwing, was faster than most military fighters of its era. William Lear opened Learjet in Wichita in nineteen sixty-two, bringing jet-powered business travel into the commercial market. Boeing's Wichita facilities produced the B-twenty-nine Superfortress bombers that flew in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.

The city earned the title Air Capital of the World, a designation the Kansas Historical Society and the aviation industry both recognize as carrying weight. The light general-aviation aircraft manufactured in Wichita, the single-engine Cessnas and Beechcraft trainers, put flying into the hands of private pilots and small businesses the same way Henry Ford's Model T put automobiles into reach of people who had never expected to own one. By the nineteen sixties and seventies, hundreds of thousands of general-aviation aircraft made in Wichita were registered across the United States.

The Kansas Aviation Museum, housed in the former Wichita Municipal Airport terminal, holds this history in the building where the first scheduled airlines departed. The terminal was built in nineteen thirty-five, after Depression-era delays. The art deco interior has been restored. Outside the windows, the runways at Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport are still in use.