Here is a early piece on the aviation history of Kingman for the 1980s, from a program for one of the air shows... Lt. Col. Smith was the author, I never had a chance to meet him. I wish I did.
KINGMAN – An area rich in aviation lore.
By
Lt. Col. Rollin C. Smith (Ret)
8th Air Force - 9th Air Force – WWII
Air activity in Kingman, Arizona, in 1982 is considerably different that it has been in the past. We were in the right place at the right time so our city played a very important part in two events that had a great impact on aviation development in this country and in the world – the first transcontinental air route and the air battles of World War II.
It was through the vision and planning of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh that Port Kingman became one of the first modern airports, linking this community to America's fledgling air transport system. Fresh from his historic flight to Paris in 1927 and the greatest hero this country had yet seen, Lindbergh and others organized Transcontinental Air Transport, Inc. (later Trans World Airlines) to offer 24-hour air service between New York City and Los Angeles. In the spring of 1929, Lindbergh scouted the proposed route and selected sites for refueling. Kingman was one such site, the first refueling stop after leaving Los Angeles.
Port Kingman, with its TAT Terminal, was constructed on 310 acres near the eastern frontier of the city. Today, if one stands in front of Hamman Lumber and Home Center on Airway Avenue and looks north, he will be looking out over the area which once held the graded and oiled runway.
The airport was completed in record time and the first TAT Ford “Tin Goose” tri-motor plane “City of Los Angeles” landed at 11:18 AM, July 8, 1929. Aboard were Col. Lindbergh, his wife, Ann Morrow Lindbergh and famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Such landings soon became a daily occurrence and it was not uncommon to see such luminaries as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford stand in the shade of the terminal building awaiting the refueling of their plane. The planes took two days to reach Columbus, Ohio, where the passengers boarded the “Airway Limited” trains for passages to New York or Washington, D. C.
Port Kingman prospered during the era of the “Tin Goose” with its washboard skin shining in the sunlight. Then one day it vanished and a different kind of plane appeared. It had only two engines, a low wing and transported more than twice the passengers carried by the tri-motor. It was the start of the Douglas DC-1, DC-2 and DC-3 era, with the fuel capacity that allowed them to by-pass Kingman as a refueling stop.
Today, two moments of Port Kingman remain. At 3375 Bank Street stands the home of the late Sen. Robert Morrow who had ancestral ties to Ann Morrow Lindbergh. This Spanish style structure, much improved, was once the TAT Terminal. And as one enters the present Mohave County Airport terminal from the flight line, a glance to the left will show a monument to Lindbergh, complete with one of the original landing lights which turn on and off with present landing lights.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, as the country began arming for the coming battles, the sky over Mohave County began to fill with warplanes and Kingman became their home base. Writers of the period described it in earthy star-spangled prose: “Kingman Army Air Field owes its birth to the Japanese rape of Pearl Harbor”.
The people of Kingman were aware that the area was being considered for a major defense installation. The uncertainty of the early months of 1942 was resolved on May 27 when a telegram was received: “The Kingman gunnery school site is approved and construction ordered”. The cost would be in excess of $3 million in construction to be supervised by the Corps of Engineers. One can well imagine the enormous economic impact on the small town of Kingman caused by the crash program to construct the required facilities.
The site, on which the present Mohave County Airport stands, comprised an area of approximately 500,000, mostly in the Hualapai Valley.
The Army Air Forces Flexible Gunnery School, Kingman, Arizona, was activated on August 24, 1942. On December 1, 1942, the first enlisted men took up quarters on the field and on December 28, the first group of 13 AT-6 small training ships was assigned. Classes started on January 18, 1943, at the new school, the sixth of its kind in the nation and soon to be the largest. The course consisted of three weeks phases, ground school and the range firing and in the final weeks, firing from combat planes. Upon completion of the several weeks of intensive training, the gunners were promoted to the rank of sergeant or staff sergeant and awarded the coveted gunners wings.
Bob Hope and Jerry Colona graduated from the screwiest aerial class on record during their appearance on April 14, 1943. As members of the Class 43-A1/2, they are the only two in history to complete the course in one day. They went first to the elementary BB type gun and appropriately, the targets were replicas of the two comedians. After hitting a Colona target squarely in the face, Bob Hope quipped, “When do we leave for Guadalcanal?”
Effective May 13, 1943, the name of the gunnery school was changed to Kingman Army Air Field because the War Department wanted the names of such installations to indicate their geographical locations.
It was proven on August 13, 1943, that the Kingman training was of a superior nature when the five-man aerial gunnery teams of the local airfield won first place among teams entered from the six gunnery schools in the country. Ranking behind Kingman were teams from airfields in Harlingen, Texas; Laredo, Texas; Tyndall Field, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada and Ft. Myers, Florida.
The second anniversary of the establishment of the Kingman field brought word that the school had received a rating of “excellent” and the “KAAF graduates had whizzed .50 caliber machine gun slugs into Jap Zekes and Tonys over the South Pacific's tropical seas and had blasted Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts out of the air over Berlin, Cologne and the Normandy Invasion beaches”.
At the war's end, after the training over 35,000 aerial gunners, the KAAF was placed on temporary inactive status, effective June 30, 1945. On September 27, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation took over the field for storage of aircraft prior to disposal.
Excess aircraft were flown in, the armaments removed, and the planes sold either for a fixed price or the highest bidder. In the spring of 1946, over 7000 planes were in storage including 2567 B-24 Liberators, 1832 B-17 Flying Fortresses, 141 B-25 Mitchells medium bombers, 478 P-38 Lightnings, 200 P-38 photo planes, 37 B-32 Super-bombers and hundreds upon hundreds of smaller planes such as P-47s, P-40s, A-26s and even one A-24 navy dive bomber. B-17, which had cost the government $105,000, were sold for $13,500: P-38s for $1,250: A-26s for $2,000: P-61s for $6,000: P-47s for $3,500: P-40s for $1,250 and the A-24 went for $1,650.
When the RFC was finished with the field, the FAA took over and slowly, through the years, relinquished control until now the Mohave County Airport Authority is in control of this facility and is developing a very fine Industrial Park. (Special thanks to the Mohave Museum of History and Art and to the Kingman Daily Miner for information used in this article).
email-- kingmanaafsd41@gmail.com
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