Kelly Field: Where American Military Aviation Was Born
Near San Antonio, Texas
On the southwest side of San Antonio, the grounds of what was once Kelly Field hold a distinction that no other American military installation can claim: the cradle of United States military aviation.
The story begins in November of nineteen sixteen, when Captain Benjamin Foulois, who had taught himself to fly partly through letters with the Wright Brothers and who would later be called the father of military aviation, selected a stretch of cotton fields south of the city. Congress had just established the Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps, and the country needed a permanent training ground. The War Department authorized a lease, and on April fifth, nineteen seventeen, the first four JN-four Jenny biplanes touched down on what had been farmland the day before. The next day, Congress declared war on Germany.
The field was named for Lieutenant George E. Kelly, who on May tenth, nineteen eleven, became the first American military pilot to die while flying a military aircraft when his plane crashed at Fort Sam Houston. Within a year of Kelly Field's opening, it had become the dominant pilot factory in the country. More American aviators who flew in the First World War earned their wings here than at any other field in the nation.
The most famous alumnus was Charles Lindbergh, who graduated first in his class from the Air Service Advanced Flying School at Kelly on March fourteenth, nineteen twenty-five, two years before his transatlantic flight made him the most celebrated man on earth. General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers trained here. General James Doolittle, who led the nineteen forty-two raid on Tokyo, served at Kelly with the One Hundred and Fourth Aero Squadron.
Kelly operated continuously from nineteen seventeen until two thousand one, among the oldest continuously operating flying bases in the United States when it finally closed. Today the grounds operate as Port San Antonio, an industrial and aerospace campus, but the ghosts of those first Jenny biplanes still seem to circle overhead.
