Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport

Texas

The first airplane ever to land in Amarillo came down in a pasture, then refueled at a street corner.

aviationhistorical

The first airplane to land in Amarillo touched down in a pasture. It was April of 1918, and two Army Signal Corps planes under a Lieutenant Gray put down in the five hundred block of North Polk. They taxied over to the corner of Northeast Fourth and North Polk, took on fuel, and left again. A year later two pilot-mechanics flew a businessman named W.K. Whipple to that same pasture. Whipple went to see the head of Amarillo's Board of City Development about starting an aviation company, and it worked. The Panhandle Air Service and Transportation Company opened for business on the first day of 1920, flying out of the city's first aerodrome, Bivins Field. A six-plane hangar went up near Fifteenth and Crockett for thirty thousand dollars. The field itself is gone. Its two runways became the streets now called North and South Julian Boulevard.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The first recorded landing of aircraft in Amarillo occurred on 27 April 1918, when two Army Signal Corps planes, commanded by a Lt. R. Gray, landed in a pasture located in the 500 block of N. Polk. They refueled at the corner of NE 4th and N. Polk, before taking off again.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Texas Air & Space Museum 0.6 mi One plane in this museum was flown forty-nine times by the man the airport is named after, who died aboard Columbia.
  • Big Texan Steak Ranch 3.3 mi A cowboy won five dollars eating four and a half pounds of steak in an hour, and the restaurant has been giving that meal away free ever since.
  • American Quarter Horse Association 6 mi A magazine article asked readers to show up in Fort Worth, and the registry that resulted now lists more than two and a half million horses.
  • Diocese of Amarillo 8 mi In 1981 the bishop of Amarillo told workers assembling the neutron bomb to quit their jobs.
  • Cadillac Ranch 16 mi In 1974 a man calling himself Leo Wyoming ran newspaper ads in Amarillo seeking used Cadillacs that need not run.
  • Masterson, Texas 32.1 mi Before the first well was drilled here, the geologist told investors flat out that nobody knew whether there was any gas under the Texas Panhandle at all.