Selfridge Military Air Museum

The airfield at Selfridge began in nineteen sixteen when Packard Motor Car Company acquired lakefront land on Lake Saint Clair for engine testing. The Army took notice and the following year opened it as a military flight training base, naming it for Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first American military pilot to die in an aviation accident, killed in a crash with Orville Wright in nineteen oh eight. By nineteen eighteen, Selfridge Field had become the nation's first aerial gunnery school.

In the nineteen forties, it was a training ground for the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American military aviators in the Army Air Corps. The base transitioned to the Michigan Air National Guard in nineteen seventy-one, and the Selfridge Military Air Museum opened in nineteen seventy-five to preserve what had been nearly sixty years of continuous aviation history. The museum holds aircraft from every major conflict of the twentieth century, all on one of the oldest continually operating military airfields in the United States.