Tulsa International Airport: Oil Boom to B-24s

You are passing one of the most improbable airports in American history, a field that in the span of a single decade went from raw prairie to the busiest commercial airport in the world.

It started with a promissory note and a wild idea. In nineteen twenty-eight, oil executive W. G. Skelly gathered a circle of Tulsa financiers, including Waite Phillips, Cyrus Avery, and a handful of other civic risk-takers, and persuaded them to co-sign what locals called a stud-horse note. The instrument was typically used by farmers pooling resources to buy a prize stallion. This time the men pledged one hundred seventy-two thousand dollars to purchase three hundred ninety acres of grassland north of the city. Tulsa Municipal Airport opened on July third, nineteen twenty-eight.

The oil economy did the rest. Within two years, passenger totals at Tulsa's new airport exceeded the combined traffic moving through the airports of Paris, London, and Berlin. In nineteen thirty, the aviation trade press declared it the busiest airport in the world. For a city of three hundred thousand people sitting on a continental interior, the distinction was extraordinary. Oil money moved people fast.

Then came the war, and the airport transformed again. The federal government transferred the field to the Army Air Forces and invited the Douglas Aircraft Company to build a bomber plant on the adjacent acreage. The facility was enormous. At its wartime peak, more than twenty-three thousand men and women reported to the Tulsa plant each day. They assembled A-twenty-four Dauntless dive bombers, A-twenty-six Invaders, and most famously, the B-twenty-four Liberator, the long-range heavy bomber that flew over every theater of the war. By April of nineteen forty-three, Tulsa workers were producing more B-twenty-fours per month than any other plant in the United States.

When the last Liberator rolled off the Tulsa line, employees bought enough war bonds to cover the full cost of the aircraft. They named it The Tulsamerican. The plane was later lost at sea, and searchers found it on the ocean floor nearly seventy years after its final flight.

The airport you see today is a quieter, civilian place, the wartime plant long gone. But the runways still carry the outline of an era when Oklahoma oil and American industrial ambition briefly made this corner of the Great Plains the center of the world.