Ellington Field: From Biplane Training Ground to Astronaut Runway

When the United States entered the First World War in nineteen seventeen, the Army needed airfields fast. One of thirty-two emergency training camps built that year went up on twelve hundred and eighty acres of Texas prairie, eighteen miles southeast of Houston. The Army named it after First Lieutenant Eric Ellington, a young aviator killed in a San Diego crash four years earlier. On November twenty-seventh, nineteen seventeen, the first plane lifted off from the new field. Within weeks, Curtis JN-Four Jenny biplanes were arriving in crates by rail from Kelly Field in San Antonio.

By April of nineteen eighteen, the field was dropping live bombs. At its World War One peak, Ellington trained bombardiers and navigators at a pace that would seem impossible a generation earlier. Then the war ended, the money stopped, and Congress closed the base in nineteen twenty.

It came back. In nineteen forty Congress authorized reconstruction, and Ellington reopened in the spring of nineteen forty-one, just months before Pearl Harbor. During the Second World War, one in every ten Army pilots passed through its flying school in the first two years alone. More than ten thousand bombardiers and navigators trained on its runways before the war's end.

The field closed again after the war but was permanently altered when NASA arrived in nineteen sixty-two as a tenant. With the Johnson Space Center just minutes away, Ellington became the place where astronauts stayed sharp between missions. T-thirty-eight jets, capable of reaching Mach one point two and climbing to fifty thousand feet, were used to put astronauts through aerobatic maneuvers simulating the disorientation of reentry. Modified Gulfstream business jets, reconfigured to fly like a space shuttle on approach, trained the pilots who would land the orbiter without engine power on a glide path seven times steeper than a commercial aircraft.

Today Ellington is a joint installation shared by Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, Coast Guard, and NASA flight operations. The same runway that saw its first Jenny in nineteen seventeen now supports the T-thirty-eights that keep astronauts current. One field, three wars, and the space program.