[Music] From the early days of aviation, adventurers and innovators from the farmlands of Kansas took flight in pursuit of their dreams, and in the process built an industrial hub that would define a city for generations.

[Music] [Music] Now the aircraft industry has been very big in Kansas ever since after World War I. One of the reasons is, is we know the wide open spaces, we have a lot of clear sky, and we have a lot of flat land you can put in an airport about anywhere.

Even near Cottonwood Ranch, I found a letter from Elsie Pratt October of 1923, and I didn't know anything about it.

They were having flying lessons at St.

Kansas.

And there were, from what I could interpret from the letter, there were two planes, and they would fly in the morning and fly in the afternoon.

And she said, "When I flew in the mornings and also in the evenings, there was a lot of traffic in the area because the cars would come down to watch them land because a lot of the crashes took place either taking off or landing."

Elsie Pratt said, "You wouldn't believe them landing in Miss Alice's field."

And Miss Alice was Miss Alice Turtle who lived within a quarter mile of the Cottonwood Ranch.

But this is a Cessna 195, and it was manufactured in 1954 in Wichita, Kansas.

To dig deeper in Kansas Aviation, the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita, Kansas is very good.

My name is Logan Doherty.

I'm the curator here at the Kansas Aviation Museum.

This museum started when a group called the WAHA or the Wichita Aeronautical Historical Association convinced the city to acquire this building from the Air Force Base and restore it to the look of when it was Wichita Municipal Airport and turn it into a museum.

So that happened.

They got the building around 89 and opened to the public in 91.

And it has been a museum that preserves the history of Kansas Aviation since then.

Even the view from the museum's control tower helps tell the story.

Okay, we have the Air Force Base.

And then this over here is all Boeing.

The first female air traffic controller worked in this tower.

Her name was Mary Chance Von Sike.

And she actually lived long enough to give tours at this museum.

And this is also the first air traffic control tower with the slanted window design, which is a global standard.

In the 1920s, there was a big boom here in Wichita for airplane manufacturers.

The earliest one is Laird and later Laird Swallow.

Oh, it was the first airplane manufactured here in Kansas.

This Laird Swallow is a replica that was made with the original blueprints.

And when they created it, they left this side open.

So you can see what the structure on a plane like this looks like.

Early airplanes, all of them were made with a cloth and wood construction, with a wooden skeleton that you can see here and wires to strengthen everything.

And then there's a layer of cloth sewn on.

We actually have a sample here of aircraft grade muslin cloth.

You can see what it looks like before it's coated, but then they will coat it with a chemical called dope.

It hardens it and shrinks it a little bit so it's tighter.

It's not super strong.

It's not like an aluminum plane like we would have today.

So the first one is Larid Swallow and then soon after that a company called Travel Air was started manufacturing airplanes.

This is a Travel Air 4000 that belonged to Louise Theden.

She used this plane to win the 1929 air race that is now known as the Powder Puff Derby.

It was an all women's air race.

Louise Theden was a Travel Air employee.

This plane actually belongs to the 99's which is a women's pilot organization that was started right after that race by 99 women pilots including Louise Theden.

Travel Air had some of the big names that created their own companies later that you may be more familiar with.

So Lloyd Steerman, Clyde Cessna, Walter Beach, they all worked for Travel Air.

In 1928 I believe, Travel Air was bought out by Curtis Wright.

Walter Beach and his wife, Olive Ann, actually moved to New York to work for Curtis Wright before they came back and started their own company.

Clyde Cessna started his own company and so did Lloyd Steerman.

This plane right here is a Steerman 4D.

It was found in a pretty sorry state in the Boneyard in Arizona.

Museum volunteers found this and brought it back to Kansas and restored it.

They put a new layer of cloth and dope on it and painted it with the original paint scheme that it would have had in the 1930's.

It was actually restored right here in this room when this was the restoration shop for the museum.

Restoration is a huge part of our volunteer projects.

So we have a pretty dedicated core of volunteers that restores planes, especially the cloth and wood planes.

They were just a frame when they were found for the museum and they've been fully restored.

It is sort of a dying art.

We are losing people who know these skills and we're always looking for more people who want to learn.

But all of our planes need constant restoration, especially the ones that are outside.

We have a large enough collection that we are doing restoration every week.

They meet every week and some come in even more frequently.

Stearman was bought out by Boeing.

So that factory complex where Boeing is today is where the Stearman factory was originally.

They bought out Stearman in the 1930's and it was sort of a slow transition over the 30's.

And they made Kaydets.

It's a Stearman biplane.

And they kept making them and called them Boeing Stearman Kaydet.

And those were used for trainers during World War II.

They are famous for training the Tuskegee Airmen on Boeing Stearman Kaydets.

Later those are also well known as crop dusting airplanes because a lot of them were available in Army surplus.

Clyde Cessna started a company.

This was their first model, Cessna Air Master.

Clyde Cessna was a farmer from Rago, Kansas.

And he actually got his hands on a French design for an airplane by Louis Blaireau.

And he decided to make one in his barn.

And he flew it over the salt flats in Enid, Oklahoma.

And he tested it and he actually crashed it a few times before he got it to work.

And then for a few years he built a plane in his barn every winter when he had the spare time.

Before he eventually joined up with Travel Air in Wichita to make airplanes.

And then when Travel Air was bought out by Curtis Wright, he created his own company.

Which he quickly turned over to his nephew, Dwayne Wallace.

And he actually went back to farming.

And he was a farmer for the last 15 years of his life.

Dwayne Wallace was the president and he created the Cessna Air Master.

This is a famous photo where Cessna got all of his men to stand along the top of the wing.

Because people were a little bit afraid of these monoplane designs.

A monoplane has less bracing between the wings than a biplane.

So this is proving the strength of the wing here.

Beechcraft was started by Walter Beech and his wife, Olive Ann Beech.

They had worked at Travel Air together, that's where they met.

And then they moved to New York when Travel Air was bought out by Curtis Wright.

But they didn't love living in New York and they wanted to come back to Wichita.

And they created Beechcraft when they came back.

This is a Beechcraft Model 17.

It's better known as the Stagger Wing.

It's actually normal for a biplane to have a staggered wing arrangement.

But it's usually the other direction.

So this is called a negative stagger.

Because the front wing is the lower one.

It's one of the most developed planes of the cloth and wood biplane era.

It came out in 1936.

And it was so high tech they took it on Antarctic expeditions in the 1930s.

This was state of the art.

This was the first plane for Beechcraft as a separate company.

And it was the last cloth and wood one.

The next one, the Beech 18, is an aluminum plane.

Really Walter liked tinkering with airplanes and flying them and doing tricks.

And the one with the head for business was his wife, Olive Ann Beech.

And as his health started to decline and he eventually passed away in the 1950s, she took over the company and was the president.

She was a very intense lady but she was very much beloved in the community.

She had these flags that were supposed to tell pilots what the weather was like for the day.

That she would put on her secretary's desk to tell people what kind of a mood she was in for the day.

And we actually have those flags in our archives.

You would have had to have been a very intense lady to be a CEO, especially of a heavy industry like airplane manufacturing in the 1950s.

And she fended off a mutiny from her board of directors.

But she gained a lot of respect in the community.

I've talked to people who grew up in aviation families who thought that Mrs.

President, Olive Ann Beech, was the president of the United States.

People respected her around here.

In 1928, city boosters came up with the air capital name to promote Wichita as a center for airplane manufacturers.

Okay, this is a Watkins Skylark.

Watkins was a pretty short-lived Wichita-based airplane manufacturer in that 1920s boom period.

And this is the first low-mounted monoplane made here in Wichita.

Watkins had some huge orders right before the stock market crash.

And they did have a fatal accident with one of their test pilots.

So they closed up in 1930.

But there was a lot of excitement in the 1920s for this company.

At one point, there were 16 airplane manufacturers here.

A lot of them were taken out by the stock market crash and the slump that happened in the early 30s with airplane sales.

Companies like Cessna, Beechcraft, and Boeing survived.

And like many industries, were bolstered by the coming of World War II.

Like the American economy in general, it gave something to be manufactured.

There were huge orders by the military for airplanes, especially at Boeing Wichita.

They made so many airplanes over there, particularly B-29 bombers, that they sometimes called it the Battle for Kansas or the Battle for Wichita.

Even though they weren't doing fighting here, it was just that big of a manufacturing effort.

The assembly lines were going 24-7.

The cafeteria over there was the largest restaurant in Kansas at the time, and it was open 24-7.

They bussed in people from the surrounding communities.

Famously, women went to work in the factories.

That's where you get the Rosie the Riveter image.

They made over 1,600 B-29s over there, the population of Wichita almost doubled before and after World War II, with how many people were brought in for that.

During World War II, they were taking off the B-29s over at Boeing on the runways here at the airport, and the military presence continued to grow until in 1954, the Air Force then purchased this facility from the city of Wichita, and Wichita created another airport Mid-Continent over on the west side of town.

Then this was the first building from McConnell Air Force Base.

It was the administrative building as they expanded all in that direction.

They had a number of different missions.

Today, their main mission is mid-air refueling, so they will refuel other airplanes, mostly now with KC-46s, KC-46 Pegasus, but for quite a while, and they still do some with the KC-135, which is a Boeing airplane.

There were a lot of air bases throughout Kansas in World War II.

At a lot of these locations, they would modify the B-29s that were coming off the production line in Wichita, and they also trained pilots there.

We have a wall in our military exhibit that has a shining star on each of those locations throughout Kansas.

In the 1950s and 60s, that was a pretty big boom for Wichita Aviation.

Cessna and Beechcraft were making tons of general aviation planes, which are not commercial or military, but just small, owner-operated airplanes that they are so well known for.

The Cessna 172 from that time period is the best-selling airplane of all time.

It was made here in Wichita.

Cessnas are known to be relatively affordable airplanes, and they also are very small, and with the high-mounted wing, it's easy to put them on floats, so they're known all over the world for going to really rugged areas.

They definitely are the closest thing to an everyman plane.

And then Boeing was still here, and they were making, throughout the 50s and the 60s, they were making jetliners like the 727 and 737, and then also bombers for the military.

This plane right here is a 727.

It was made by Boeing to go to medium-sized airports that couldn't accommodate the larger 707 from Boeing.

Because of that, it actually has built-in air stairs in the back, because in this time period they didn't have air stairs for all of these planes.

And that actually made these planes... It was possible to open the stairs and jump out the back, and then there was a famous high-profile airplane jacking, where a guy who was later identified as DB Cooper hijacked a 727 like this, and jumped out the back.

There were theories about him being ex-CIA because of this.

They never found him or the money he demanded, but then there were a number of copycat hijackers after that, and they were all caught.

And there was eventually a switch called the DB Cooper switch, or the Cooper vane that didn't allow those stairs to be opened while it was flying.

And then this one on this side is a Boeing 737, which was the next commercial jetliner by Boeing.

They still use 737s in the 737 MAX configuration.

It's pretty common to fly on them today.

That's probably the most common.

The 737 family is the most common commercial airliner flying today.

Ours still has seats in it.

It was owned by a local airline called Ryan International, and it was donated to us by them.

It's still in their paint scheme with the orange stripe.

That is a B-47.

It was the main bomber for the Air Force right after the war, World War II.

It's the first swept-wing bomber and the first jet engine bomber.

And they made a bunch of them over here at Boeing Wichita.

They were pretty dangerous, and the engines actually weren't even strong enough for it to take off, and it was fully loaded on its own power.

So they strapped rockets to it to get it off the ground.

The rocket-assisted take-offs, they called that.

They actually lost 10% of all of them to crashes.

But it wasn't that long before they developed the B-52.

The B-52 was the next bomber for the Air Force.

It was also made by Boeing.

It's that classic Cold War bomber.

They had them flying 24-7 with nukes ready to drop them wherever they were told to go.

They were also used to bomb North Vietnam.

Ours was used for that and is still in the Vietnam paint scheme.

This is our B-52.

It's our biggest plane.

The wingspan is 185 feet, which is actually larger than the 120 feet that the Wright brothers were off the ground for their first flight.

It has eight jet engines.

They were nuclear-capable, and ours was actually deactivated as part of a nuclear reduction treaty in the 1980s.

And it's been here since this was part of the Air Force.

We actually have it on loan from the National Museum of the Air Force.

Learjet came to Wichita in the 1960s because the aviation industry that was already here, Bill Lear had this goal of creating a private jet, and he actually started in Switzerland, and he didn't really get along with his Swiss engineers.

Apparently, he would work on their drawings in pen when they were out to lunch, and they didn't care for him.

So he moved here for the aviation industry, and he did develop the Learjet 23, which is the first private jet.

Jets had been used by the military and for jet liners, for commercial aviation, but the first private jet was the Learjet 23.

And then Bill Lear went to work trying to convince people they needed a private jet.

So he famously flew around a bunch of celebrities.

This is a Learjet 23.

This is the plane that Bill Lear came to Wichita to develop.

He had the goal to finish a private jet in a year, and he actually finished this in nine months.

One interesting fact I always bring up about Learjet is they invented the eight-track player to go in these things.

You can't very well have a vinyl record in an airplane.

It'll skip way too bad.

And actually, the audio cassette that we oftentimes associate with the 80s was already invented, but the first commercially successful recorded music on tape was the eight-track.

And some old eight-tracks even have Learjet stamped on them.

And actually, decades earlier, in the 1930s, Bill Lear invented the car radio, and he called it Motorola.

A mixture of motor and maybe Victrola.

And then all the other aviation companies kind of scrambled to make private jets.

The Cessna Citation is an answer to the Learjet.

In the 70s, it was kind of the closest we got for it to being affordable for any regular person to own and operate an airplane.

So there were a lot of learn-to-fly campaigns at Cessna.

That's freedom calling.

Can you hear it?

Five dollars buys it.

Your first lesson in a Cessna.

It's no dream.

You're really flying.

There's a licensed instructor at your side, but you do the flying.

Easy banks.

Power climbs.

Gliding turns, and you've done it.

You know how it feels to fly.

There's nothing like it on the ground.

You could buy a small Cessna and fly it around for business meetings, even if you were a middle-class individual.

That was always the dream of early aviation, that everyone would own an airplane.

This is a Cessna 206, and this plane specifically was owned by Gary Adamson.

He started flying medical emergencies and cadavers in western Kansas until he expanded it into an airline that served western Kansas called Air Midwest.

It's still painted in the Air Midwest color scheme from the 1970s.

Then in the 1980s, there was a big slump in the aviation market worldwide.

Beechcraft kind of gave a big swing and a miss with the Beechcraft Starship.

It's a really cool and unique designed airplane, but it was not commercially successful.

This is our Beechcraft Starship.

We're actually working on restoring it right now, so it just has a coat of primer on it.

This was a very unique design when it came out in 1986.

It has two turboprop pusher propellers.

Most planes have puller propellers that pull it forward, but this has two propellers that push it forward.

Because of that, it has a different tail.

To add some vertical stability, it has giant winglets on the end of the wings that Beechcraft called tip sails.

It also has these front wings called canards.

It's difficult to see by looking at it, but it's a composite airplane, which means that instead of an aluminum skin like most of these other airplanes, it has a carbon fiber weave on the outside.

All of these unique design features were supposed to break Beechcraft out of the slump of the 1980s, but it did mean that the airplane came in over budget and it wasn't quite as affordable as they were hoping for.

It took a long time to certify carbon fiber with the FAA, and it didn't undercut the prices of private jets like they had hoped for.

They made about 50 of them and they recalled quite a few of them.

And then Beechcraft and Cessna were both bought out by a few different companies, and now they're owned by Texstron today.

Learjet was bought out by Bombardier, which is a Canadian company.

In examining this aviation history, one might ask, why Kansas?

I really think it's sort of a snowball effect.

They started being successful here and more people wanted to get in on it, and that's why Learjet came here even decades after the 20s boom.

He still knew that this was a hub for aviation.

So I think those sorts of things draw people to them.

I think innovation, those early pioneers here in Wichita were not afraid to try things.

It blows me away that they climbed into airplanes they built themselves without ever flying an airplane.

Some of these guys built their first airplane with no training on flying and then tried to fly it like Clyde Cessna.

That takes a lot of courage.

And then innovating all kinds of different designs, shifts from like a biplane to a monoplane.

So I think innovation would be a great legacy and hopefully we can continue to innovate here at the aviation companies we still have.