Why Wichita is the Air Capital of the World

Wichita is usually billed because the “Air Capital of the World” and, after spending a aviation-filled day on the bottom there, it’s exhausting to argue. The declare isn’t exaggerated however somewhat an accumulation of information — many years of plane manufacture, check and restoration; a dense cluster of suppliers and OEMs; and a college analysis engine that feeds trade with innovation and certified fingers. Stroll the ramp on the Kansas Aviation Museum, wander via a Bombardier hangar or spend a day at NIAR and the indicators are there for all to see: it is a place the place aluminium, composites and concepts have been married, repaired and reinvented for greater than a century.

However “Air Capital” additionally describes town’s pervading tradition. Wichita’s id is woven via with aviation as absolutely as its wheatfields gave town its college mascot. There’s a proud, sensible lineage right here — B-29s, Beechcraft, Cessna, Learjet, Spirit and, at the moment, Bombardier and a thriving test-and-repair ecosystem — that has saved expert machinists, engineers and innovators in a single place for generations. The consequence isn’t just a manufacturing line however an ecosystem: museums that protect the story, universities that push the envelope, non-public corporations that refine the craft and native diners the place pilots can watch the subsequent craft contact down at an airfield restaurant.

Kansas Aviation Museum

The Kansas Aviation Museum sits in a good-looking Thirties terminal constructing and feels, instantly, like a metropolis’s single-room reminiscence. The constructing itself—an Artwork Deco municipal airport terminal—anchors the gathering.

One of many first issues we’re advised is that the FAA archives for each airplane till they moved to a digital system – 3 million information in toal – are saved on the museum. Extremely, there are 200,000 artefacts, and these archives depend as only one!

The museum’s reveals hint Wichita’s contribution from early Swallows and Stearmans via wartime manufacturing and on to enterprise jets and trendy composites.

My go to was half museum-tour, half small revelation, and I had the chance to clamber inside a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, an American navy aerial refuelling tanker plane used within the Vietnam Conflict, in addition to in later conflicts equivalent to Operation Desert Storm (an aerial bombing marketing campaign towards Iraq in 1991).

Apparently, that is the one privately owned KC-135 on the planet. (They’re normally nonetheless owned by the navy however this one isnt.)

My go to concluded with a go to to the management tower from which I might see a sequence of Boeing 737 MAX fuselages within the distance. Situated subsequent to the museum is Spirit AeroSystems, one of many world’s largest producers of aerostructures and a key provider to Boeing.

Spirit builds the fuselages for the Boeing 737 MAX at their Wichita facility earlier than they’re loaded onto particular railcars to be transported to Boeing’s closing meeting level in Renton, Washington.

NIAR at Wichita State College

NIAR—the Nationwide Institute for Aviation Analysis at Wichita State College—is the place Wichita’s scrappy manufacturing previous meets twenty-first-century R&D. NIAR is a big, multifaceted check and growth hub: suppose tensile testing, composites certification, wind tunnels, additive manufacturing labs and automation centres that exist expressly to push prototypes to certification and into manufacturing.

A memorable, pleasant and barely surreal second was being greeted by WuShock—the college’s amusing mascot, a “muscle-bound bundle of wheat” that, in Wichita vernacular, symbolises the area’s agrarian roots and no-nonsense grit.

Two NIAR particulars stayed with me. First, their additive-manufacturing (3D printing) work: prototypes and flight-worthy components at the moment are being printed, examined and licensed—applied sciences that had been as soon as experimental at the moment are feeding each aerospace and non-aerospace purposes. (I noticed examples of labor that reach to medical implants and structural elements). NIAR’s labs don’t deal with 3D printing as a novelty however as a certifiable manufacturing path.

Second, the robotics and automation divisions felt much less like a science-fair and extra like a complicated meeting line of the long run: automated cells for dealing with elements, automated inspection rigs and a devoted robotics centre tackling issues from materials dealing with to advanced meeting.

We had been proven a complicated gearbox-assembly facility—small, exact, and clearly designed to scale— largely automated, however with some human enter.

Stearman Airfield Bar and Grill

If NIAR is the place Wichita builds its aviation future, the Stearman Airfield Bar and Grill is the place it celebrates its previous.

Located beside a personal airstrip, this fascinating venue places you inside yards of arriving and departing gentle plane. A dwelling theatre, when you like, for aviation lovers.

I ordered the Stearman Burger and watched pilots taxi between bites. It’s consolation meals that is aware of its viewers – pilots and lovers, brunching households and anybody who finds being that near a taxiing Cessna infinitely calming.

Bombardier

Bombardier has made Wichita its US headquarters for sure operations and continues to make use of the positioning for service, testing and defence work; the campus has grown from just a few hangars to many, and its presence indicators that worldwide OEMs nonetheless worth Wichita’s provide chain and workforce.

Background checks for our particular, non-public tour are performed at reception the place a custom-made Learjet Chopper bike, first unveiled at a motor speedway occasion some 20 years in the past, is the speaking level for any new customer.

From there, we had been taken via defence modification areas—extremely safe areas the place bespoke modifications are made to plane techniques and installations. Understandably, images was not permitted inside these zones – a reminder that some wings of the trade stay rightly and tightly regulated.

Bombardier additionally operates flight-test and certification exercise in Wichita and hosts vital upkeep, restore and overhaul (MRO) capability. We had been guided via the paint room and the wheel and tyre store the place some 4,200 wheels are serviced or repaired yearly, many for NetJets, and into a customized park trailer used to watch flights that transcend the velocity of sound.

The latter might scan 200 miles round it with its fastened antennae at Wichita, or as much as 90 miles with cellular antennae. We even went inside a Bombardier International 7000 esimulator as a part of our go to—an uncanny, compact style of what flight crews practice for.

Our go to completed on a nostalgic excessive notice and in an space the place we might as soon as once more take pictures. The Basic Lear Jet Basis’s restoration of the very first customer-delivered Learjet (serial 23-003) is being overseen on the campus, in Constructing 14—the previous Learjet supply facility.

The restoration is a labour of affection sitting inside a contemporary industrial context: volunteers and Bombardier workers collaborating to return a 1964 landmark to life. It’s symbolic—Wichita doesn’t merely make planes; it perpetuates the legacy, additional cementing town’s deserved title of ‘Air Capital of the World’.

So, there you could have it. Wichita’s declare isn’t simply advertising hype however rests on tangible pillars—historic manufacturing, OEM presence, a college R&D engine and a dense MRO and provider base.

Our insights had been made doable via hosted visits to the Kansas Aviation Museum, NIAR, Stearman Airfield Bar and Grill and Bombardier as a part of the TBEX Wichita journey blogger convention, supported by Go to Wichita and with transport between the venues offered by Concord Charters and Journey.

In the event you love aviation, or just respect the romance of expert fingers shaping metallic into significant movement, Wichita is definitely worth the detour.