History
The airport has its origins in 1942 with the establishment by the Army Air Corps of Hondo Army Airfield, and was used as a Navigator training base. The Women's Air Force Service Pilot squadrons were assigned there in November 1943. Two notable woman pilots, Betty Henrich and Hollywood stunt actress Mary Wiggins, were among the first WASPs to report for duty. Between July 1942 and August 1945 some 14,158 navigators were trained at Hondo. The base was closed on December 29, 1945, and the buildings and fixtures were sold as surplus.
Between 1945 and 1951 civilian operators such as the Hollaway flying school trained student pilots at the former base under the GI Bill. As a result of the Korean War, the United States Air Force reactivated the base as a contract pilot training center, training pilots at Hondo Air Base. It closed again in 1958.
During the 1960s the city of Hondo leased facilities at the base to the Hondo Livestock Auction and to Gary Aerospace, Universal Rundle, and Doss Aviation. The aviation companies worked with the United States Air Force to screen pilots, and Universal Rundle manufactured toilets.
In 1957 a golf course was constructed on the base through the efforts of base commander Lt Col Earl V. Riley. A golf tournament bearing his name remained a yearly event in the 1980s. In the spring of 1973 the Air Force began a flight-screening program at Hondo using the T-41 Mescalero, a militarized version of the civilian Cessna 172. The training program, still in operation in the 1980s, was attended by United States and foreign students.
After the mid-1970s the base housed a number of businesses, including a fiberglass-products plant, a greenhouse, a national guard armory, and the Medina Electric Cooperative.
Read more about this topic: Hondo Municipal Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)