The state of Ohio recently announced the allocation of $3.5 million to rehabilitate and reopen a second runway at the Wilmington Air Park.
A historic precedent exists for that.
The airport in Wilmington has been built around the original Clinton County Army Air Field, which became a satellite airfield supporting Wright Field during World War II. It was expanded and renamed Clinton County Air Force Base in 1947.
One of the missions that operated from there was the All Weather Flying Center. Project Thunderstorm operated aircraft built for combat to be flown into the treacherous Midwestern weather to learn more about what makes our weather so nasty and how to survive it.
The base was closed in 1972 and has developed into an airfreight center.
In Ohio, there is some history with the government stepping in with the needed money to expand, and in some cases save, an airport from total decline.
In the 1920s, the city of Dayton made the decision to have its municipal airport in Vandalia, 12 miles north of the city. The city was in jeopardy of being left out of the new federal air mail routes if it didn't have a city-owned airport. Community leaders such as Edward Deeds and Charles Kettering stepped in and made that happen. The updated airmail charts soon included Dayton.
By the middle of the next decade and in the depths of the Depression, the city-owned airport had fallen into sad shape. The airfield was grass and becoming a liability to operate the larger and more modern aircraft. Once again local leadership in conjunction with Ohio Gov. James M. Cox appealed to President Franklin Roosevelt for federal relief funds. Cox had a good relationship with FDR, as about 10 years prior Cox was the presidential candidate and FDR was his running mate. The Works Progress Administration — known as the WPA — approved the project and things began to happen fast.
The work began in April 1936 and was completed by December of the same year.
In nine months the airport was transformed into a modern aviation facility. More than 150,000 square yards of hard surfaced runways were created. It employed more than 400 workers in two shifts. Additional repairs were made to the existing hangars, doubling the lighting on the field, removal of trees and new sodding
At the Wilmington Airpark the runway that’s going to be fixed up and reopened is the original 9,000-foot runway that was built for the air base. The runway being used now is over 10,000 feet long and was built for a promised DHL international cargo facility. That turned out to be an empty promise as DHL pulled out of Wilmington and thousands of jobs were lost.
That void was filled in large part by Amazon and its new air cargo operation created to support the growing Amazon need for shipping it could control.
If you live south of Dayton and keep an eye on the sky you’ll notice a steady stream of large airliners descending from altitude. A check on FlightAware will confirm that their destination is Wilmington.
Those aircraft are the 21st century legacy of the Wright brothers, which is economic development and jobs for Ohioans.