Sept. 1 was a special day for Wichita: It was the 100th anniversary of the day the Air Capital of World was born.
It was Sept. 1, 1916 when Clyde Cessna signed a contract at the J.J. Jones Car Co. building to start manufacturing planes, reports The Wichita Eagle.
Today, more than one-fifth of America’s civilian aircraft are built in Wichita or by Wichita companies.
“As one airline pilot once said, ‘You can’t land at any airport in the world without seeing a Wichita airplane,’ ” the story quotes Richard Harris, former chairman of the Kansas aviation centennial.
Yeah — here’s just a PARTIAL list of the historic plane-makers who have built some of the over-QUARTER-MILLION aircraft built in Wichita over the last 100 years, in roughly chronoloogical order:
Cessna (all)
Laird (Swallow)
Swallow (all)
Travel Air (all)
Stearman (all)
Beech (nearly all)
Boeing (Stearman trainers, B-29, B-47, B-52; fuselages for 727, 737, 757, forward sections of all current jetliners, Scout, etc.; also Air Force One 747 conversion; invention of flying boom for jet tankers)
Culver (Cadet, wartime PQ-8/-14 drones, Culver V)
WACO (CG-4A combat gliders, by Cessna & Beech)
Rawdon (T-1A)
Mooney (Model 18 Mite)
Learjet (all)
Bell (Helicopter fuselages, by Beech)
Great Lakes (biplane 1970s revival)
Piaggio (fuselages, by Learjet)
Hawker (most models)
…and more!
Homebuiilts, Kitbuilts & Ultralights:
Corben Baby Ace
Wichhawk
Prescott Pusher
Belite (single-seat Kitfox)
And major engineering sites for:
Stearman-Northrop (1930s)
Bombardier (global flight test center)
Airbus (where the A380 wing was designed)
And in surrounding communities:
Bede BD-4 and BD-5 kits (sold from Newton)
HGL Aero Eagle (assembled for U.S. sale in Augusta)
Today the city builds 75% of the structure of the world’s most popular jetliner: The Boeing 737, and major sections of all other Boeing jetliners.
And the city produces about a fifth of U.S. planes, ranging from Belite ultralights, to Beech Bonanza and Baron, to Cessna Caravan, to Beech King Air, to Learjet and Citation jets.
It also produces aircraft parts, equipment and/or instruments for almost all major U.S., Canadian, Brazilian and Western European aircraft manufacturers.
FlightSafety International and the National Center for Aviation Training train hundreds of pilots and aircraft technicians every year, and Wichita State University, with the adjacent National Institute for Aviation Research, produces hundreds of new engineers every year, in every major field in aviation, including Ph.D.s in Aeronautical Engineering.
Wichita Eisenhower Airport, McConnell Air Force Base and Beech Field are towered jet airports, and untowered Jabara airport has jet services. A dozen other airfields surround the city and county.
In 1929, the combined output of Wichita’s Travel Air, Cessna, Stearman and Swallow factories, plus that of a dozen other tiny factories, produced the highest number of aircraft of any city in America — earning the city the coveted title “Air Capital City” from the aviation industry’s main trade organization in the 1920s: The Aeronautica Chamber of Commerce.
Since then, the city has almost continuously outproduced — in numbers of aircraft — every other city in the United States, and (in the most of last half-century) every other city in the world.
Want aviation talent? Come HERE !