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Wichita, The Air Capital!
By Carl Chance, Editor, WingsOverKansas.com
It is worthy to affirm Wichita’s Unique position among the aviation industry, where nowhere else you will find the concentration of top-name general aviation aircraft manufacturers co-located within such a concentrated geographic boundary. What the city of Detroit had become to the automobile in the last century, and Silicon Valley had become to the computer-chip, so too has Wichita, Kans. become the nations and the world’s hot spot for aircraft development and manufacturing!
A Legacy
This incredible business journey has seen the Kansas aviation industry get its fledgling start during the late 1800s when the imaginative but unworkable concepts were envisioned by thinkers and dreamers and converted into reality as test aircraft by mechanics, craftsmen, and blacksmiths. It has seen Kansas become the proving grounds for such industry icons as Walter and Olive Ann Beech, Clyde Cessna, Matty Laird, Lloyd Stearman, and Bill Lear, just to name a few. Through the “Golden Age” of Barnstorming and Airracing, the Kansas Aviation connection has always been at the forefront with such names as Amelia Earhart, Art Goebel, Frank Hawks, Benny Howard, and Blanche Noyes. Kansas has also played a significant role as a key component in the “arsenal of democracy,” with su ch intrepid manufacturers as Boeing (Wichita) and North American Aviation (Kansas City, Kans.) building medium and heavy bombers in the heartland. This amazing legacy is sustained even to this day as new names emerge to carry on the tradition of development that set the world standard for excellence in recreational, business, and military aviation.
How Bill Piper and His Piper Cub Taught America How to Fly
By Alan Smith
We all know that a number of men played a significant role in the development of the private aircraft. We know about Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, Don Luscombe and others, but only one really made a personal plane affordable to the masses. That was William T/ Piper of Bradford, Pennsylvania where he worked in his father’s oil business. He was well into middle age before he found himself moving into the airplane business and did not learn to fly until he was 60 years old.
Early in the century, shortly after the Wright Brothers had proved the powered airplane possible at Kitty Hawk North Carolina on December 17, 1903, Piper had been in the military, had been involved in the Spanish American War, and had earned a Harvard degree in mechanical engineering. He set out to get into the industrial construction business, but soon lost interest in that and returned to Bradford with his family to join his father in the oil business.