Benbrook Field: Where the Flying Triangle Trained the War's First Pilots

When the United States entered World War One in nineteen seventeen, it had almost no trained military pilots. The British Royal Flying Corps offered to help, and after scouting sites across Texas, they chose three fields near Fort Worth for a joint training program known as the Flying Triangle. Benbrook Field was the third point of that triangle.

From October nineteen seventeen onward, American and Canadian volunteers arrived here to learn to fly in biplanes above the North Texas prairie. Among the instructors was Vernon Castle, a world-famous ballroom dancer who had taught Americans the tango before the war. Castle died at Benbrook on February fifteenth, nineteen eighteen, swerving to avoid a student pilot and crashing his own aircraft.

The field closed in April nineteen nineteen. The land became a dairy farm, and today the site lies beneath a suburban subdivision.