Rich Field, Waco's First Airfield
Near Waco, Texas
In nineteen seventeen, as the United States rushed to build an air force for the First World War, the federal government chose Waco as the site of one of thirty-two Army Air Service training camps established that year. The result was Rich Field, the first military airfield in Texas and one of the earliest serious aviation training facilities the country had ever operated.
The field was named for Second Lieutenant C. Perry Rich, the tenth American pilot to die in a flying accident, who had crashed his Wright biplane into Manila Bay in November nineteen thirteen. The War Department and Waco's Chamber of Commerce agreed on a six hundred and ninety-acre site that August, and by November, the first aircraft had arrived from Kelly Field in San Antonio, uncrated and assembled on the spot.
The Army initially used the Standard J-one as its trainer, with two hundred and forty-three of them assigned at Rich Field's peak, before switching to the Curtis JN-four, the Jenny, in nineteen eighteen. Between three hundred and forty and four hundred and ten cadets passed through before the Armistice of November eleventh, nineteen eighteen ended the war. They learned to fly in open cockpits over the Brazos River valley, navigating by landmarks in a world that had no radio aids to navigation and no instrument panels worth the name.
After the war, Rich Field briefly became a civilian airport, the first in Waco, hosting traveling aerialists and flying circuses through the nineteen twenties and thirties. Eventually the site was absorbed by the city's development. Nothing obvious marks it today, but what happened here mattered: Rich Field was where American military aviation in Texas took its first real steps, training the pilots who would become the instructors and commanders of the Second World War generation two decades later.
Waco's relationship with aviation did not end there. Fort Fisher, the WWII-era facility nearby, trained thousands more. The city became, quietly, one of the great flight-training towns in American history.
