History
The airport was originally constructed at a cost of $10 million as a U.S. Army Air Forces base during World War II, opening in 1941 under the name Baer Field and later Baer Army Air Field. During wartime, over 100,000 military personnel served out of Baer Field and its more than 100 structures. The principal units at the installation were the First Troop Carrier Group and the 45th Army Air Force Base Unit. By the end of World War II, the city of Fort Wayne bought the airport from the federal government's General Services Administration for the price of $1, renaming it Fort Wayne Municipal Airport in 1946.
Under the management of the Fort Wayne/Allen County Airport Authority since 1985, the airport was renamed Fort Wayne International Airport in 1991. Through the 1990s, the airport underwent the largest expansion and revitalization in its history, with an expanded and updated terminal designed by MSKTD & Associates, Inc., runway upgrades, and the establishment of the Air Trade Center on the southwest side of the property. In 2006, a modernized 210 feet (64 m) air traffic control tower was opened on the south side of the airport, at a price of $9.7 million.
Located in the Lieutenant Paul Baer Terminal, the Greater Fort Wayne Aviation Museum recounts early aviation history in Northeastern Indiana.
Read more about this topic: Fort Wayne International Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)