The World’s Oldest Continuously Operating Airport
The Field of Firsts
Want to win an aviation trivia contest next time you’re on a boring flight with a colleague? Ask him or her to name the world’s oldest continuously operating airport.
Chances are that they’ll answer “Kitty Hawk.”
Nope. That has not been an airport for decades.
“Well, then. Dayton. That’s where the Wright Brothers launched their airplane.”
No again. After a few moments in deep thought. . .
“Of course! Le Bourget! That’s the terminus of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight.” Not even close.
The world’s oldest continuously operating airport is College Park, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. And the aviation “firsts” don’t stop there. At College Park Airport, history is not sealed behind glass. It is still moving down the runway, in a place where early military flight, airmail, experimentation, and preservation all overlap in one small field.
It is a living archive of American aviation beginnings.
The Wright Connection
After their historic flight near Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903, the Wright Brothers knew they had the potential for a business, but they also recognized that the original Wright Flyer, while it had proved a heavier-than-air machine could fly, needed to be improved. Over the next few years, they introduced the Wright Flyer II and then the -III and in 1908, began marketing their airplanes to stunt flyers and aspiring pilots. Of course, there were no flight schools or instructors, so they were often also hired to train the customers who bought their machines.
The U.S. Army
The Army had used balloons and dirigibles for aerial surveillance dating back to the Spanish-American War. As early as 1905, the Wright Brothers had approached the Army with a proposal for its Flyer, but the top brass could not see the value in this new technology, and their advances were denied. In 1907, it created the Aeronautical Division with the Army Signal Corps. By now, barnstormers were demonstrating flying machines all over the country, and new voices in the military began advocating another look at using airplanes.
One such man was Lieutenant Benjamin D. Foulois, who was sent to Signal School and wrote a thesis in which he predicted that future conflict would very likely occur between enemy forces in the air, as well as with ground forces. The Army took note and put out a request for bids for airplanes, which had to be delivered for test flights quickly.
The “Wright Military Flyer” was the only submission that could meet the Army’s bid requirements of delivering an airplane within 200 days, and they delivered the first aircraft in 1908 to Ft. Myer, Virginia. Unfortunately, as pilot Orville Wright circled Ft. Myer in “Signal Corps Airplane No. 1” on a demonstration flight from the parade ground, it crashed, killing Lt. Thomas Selfridge and seriously injuring Orville. It took 10 months for the Wrights to modify the Military Flyer and resume deliveries.
Meanwhile, Foulois convinced Army brass that establishing a flying school for fixed-wing airplanes was neither feasible nor safe within the cramped confines of Ft. Myer, and they began searching for open space that had easy access to Washington, various Army bases, and—importantly—a railway line. The Army also wanted a place where they could train pilots in these new airplanes away from the prying eyes of neighbors such as those in the hemmed-in Ft. Myer area. As many as 7,000 people had gathered to watch the famous Orville Wright and his flying machine.
Lieutenant Frank Lahm was the son of a famous balloonist and was certified as a balloon pilot himself. He was from Ohio and his father had previously introduced him to the Wright Brothers. He was ordered to fly an Army balloon in search of a new site for the world’s first military flight training school. As he drifted north of the Potomac River into Maryland, the nation’s capital to his left, he spotted a large expanse of flat land. There were few trees. And the B & O main railway line that ran from Washington to Philadelphia and New York ran right past the edge of the field.
Frank Lahm reported his findings, and after senior officers visited the site in person, they all agreed. The site was in College Park, Maryland, and on August 25, 1909, the Army signed a lease and began building their airport. Incredibly, just six weeks later, on October 7, 1909, the first airplane arrived from the Wright Brothers. It was uncrated and assembly began at the first of seven hangars that would ultimately become an aircraft manufacturing hub.
The Army’s contract called for the Wright Brothers to train two pilots, who would then become the flight instructors for future pilots. As soon as the Wright Flyer was assembled, Wilbur Wright arrived. The first two US military officers ever to be chosen to fly an airplane were Lieutenants Frederic Humphreys and Frank Lahm—the balloonist who discovered the site for the airport. With those first flights on October 8,1909 College Park Airport began its unbroken record of operations that remains to this day.
The next day, Wilbur Wright flew his Flyer around a 500-meter circuit at College Park, establishing a new world speed record of 46 miles per hour.
On October 26, 1909, after only three hours of flight instruction from Wilbur Wright, Humphreys gained the distinction of being the first person to ever solo in a government-owned aircraft.
The Field of Firsts
The Army’s official position had changed. It now concluded that the future lay in airplanes and not lighter-than-air machines. There was great excitement amongst young officers who were anxious to be selected for flying lessons at College Park.
And those aspirations were not limited to Army officers. Irene Van Demen was wife to Ralph Van Demen, an Army intelligence officer who came to be known as the “father of military intelligence.” He talked to her about the new flying school and she pestered and implored him to introduce her to Wilbur Wright. On October 27, 1909, Wilbur took Irene up for a joyride at College Park Airport, making this the first time an American woman ever rode in an airplane.
The First Aerial Machine Gun
While some in the Army Signal Corps had envisioned the aeroplane as a replacement for the balloons and dirigibles as a surveillance vehicle, others predicted that it would, one day, become a tool for combat. Yet those early thoughts of using the airplane as a weapon ended with the conclusion that a pilot would carry a bomb up into the air and then simply lob it overboard. The Army needed a more precise way of targeting, if this would indeed be part of future warfare. Thus, it designed a method of using bomb sites, and the first test flights on simulated bombing runs were conducted at College Park.
Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Lewis of the Army Coastal Artillery Corps had invented a machine gun, and he showed up at College Park asking if it could be tested from an aeroplane.
On June 7, 1912, the experiment was launched. A Wright Flyer lifted off from College Park with Lieutenant Thomas DeWitt Milling at the controls and Captain Charles Chandler in the passenger’s seat, the Lewis gun mounted on a swiveling turret beside him. As Milling banked the aircraft in low passes over a cloth target, Chandler opened fire — and forty-five of his fifty rounds found their mark.
The age of aerial combat so essential to modern warfare more than a century later began that day in College Park, Md. The Lewis machine gun went on to be used as an invaluable weapon by British, and later by US forces in World War One.
Aerial Communication
The Signal Corps now fully embraced using aircraft, but there was no way for its pilots to communicate with controllers on the ground. In 1912, the Army had developed a new radio, and the very first air-to-ground radio messages were made on a test flight at College Park Airport.
“Hap” Arnold
General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, known as “The father of the U.S. Air Force” was trained in Ohio by the Wright Brothers and assigned to College Park as a flight instructor. Immediately after he was licensed, he gained fame by setting a new altitude record of becoming the first pilot to fly a mile high (he actually flew to 6,450 feet), and he became a tireless advocate of creating the air corps as a separate military unit. When he saw his vision come true and Congress formed the US Air Force, “Hap” Arnold became the only person in history to become a five-star general in both the Army and the Air Force.
Air Mail
There had been attempts to deliver mail by air as early as 1911, and the U.S. Postal Department began studying whether they could offer air mail on a regular scheduled basis, rather than the occasional ad hoc flights. The Postal Department bought six JR-1B biplanes, which Curtiss Aircraft modified to carry mail instead of a passenger. It hired civilian pilots for its new air mail service, and on August 12, 1918, the nation’s first scheduled airmail service began from College Park (where mail from Washington could be unloaded from the adjacent railway station) to Philadelphia and New York.
The Postal Department even issued a special stamp commemorating this new service.
Pilots of the first flights often became disoriented and lost. One took off, heading north for Philadelphia and ended up far to the south in Virginia. The USPD built a stone compass rose that pointed to north and required each pilot to line his plane with the compass rose and align his rudimentary instruments with true north before each departure. It also built a hangar for sorting mail, and incredibly, that hangar and the compass rose still exist at College Park today. Indeed, even the airport’s IATA three-letter code, CGS, comes from its airmail roots when the Postal Department designated it: the CGS stood for the “ColleGe Station.”
Civil Aviation
While College Park’s airport owed its founding to the military, civilians soon saw the benefit of using the airport with wide open approaches and close proximity to Maryland Agriculture College, which later became the University of Maryland.
After a bitterly cold winter, when flying in open cockpits through subzero weather and heavy snow made flight training insufferable, the Army moved training to Georgia, then Texas, and finally to San Diego, California. It was civilian flying that took over and ensured that the airport would not only continue to operate but would thrive.
Dr. William Christmas designed his own airplane and became the second person to ever fly a heavier-than-air airplane after the Wright Brothers. His Christmas Aeroplane Company set up a hangar at College Park Airport in 1911 and started building the Red Bird II as a less expensive competitor to the Wright Flyer.
As soon as the Army ended its lease and moved pilot training south in 1912, the Washington Aeroplane Company took over one of the hangars and began building its Columbia biplane and training civilian pilots. As flying became a phenomenon that fascinated Americans from barnstormers to wealthy thrill seekers and those who foresaw careers flying airplanes, there was no shortage of applicants for these new planes—and for flying lessons.
Emile Berliner had become wealthy after inventing the gramophone, and as early as 1907 he had devoted his attention to developing an airplane that could take off and land vertically. When his son Henry left the Army Air Service in 1919, he joined his father at Berliner Helicopter Company, and while they had multiple failures, most of their test flying took place at College Park.
Berliner had been chasing vertical flight at College Park since 1922, when his first practical helicopter lifted off in front of Navy officials. By 1924, refinements brought the aircraft to its best recorded performance — and the Smithsonian, which now owns the surviving Model C, calls it the first controlled helicopter flight in history, a claim aviation historians still debate—though the surviving Model C, now on display at the College Park Aviation Museum, which is owned and operated by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. It remains one of the strangest-looking aircraft in American aviation.
The first use of acetylene lamps to allow an airplane make nighttime landings; the first use of navigational aids to allow a pilot to find the airport in poor visibility, these aviation innovations are also additions to this “field of firsts.”
By the early 1960s, the airport faced the threat of commercial development. To save it, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission purchased the facility in 1973. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the airport was placed deep within the highly protected Washington D.C. Flight Restricted Zone (FRZ).
College Park Airport may not be the most famous airport in the world, nor the largest or busiest. Yes, it has a museum that should be a “must-see” for aviation enthusiasts, but the airport of yesteryear is very much still an active operating airport of today. Look past the high-tech restrictions of the modern D.C. flight zone, and you’ll find a runway that still plays host to everyday general aviation. When a single-engine Cessna throttles up and lifts off from College Park today, it isn’t just taking flight—it’s echoing the exact path Wilbur Wright, Hap Arnold, and the pioneers of the airmail service took over a century ago.
So, the next time you find yourself trapped on a tedious flight, looking out the window at the clouds, ask your seatmate that trivia question. Let them guess Kitty Hawk or Le Bourget. And when you tell them about a quiet, historic field in Maryland where the world’s military, postal, and modern aviation tech actually learned to fly, you won’t just win a trivia game—you’ll be keeping the story of the Field of Firsts alive.
If you go: A visit to the College Park Aviation Museum, which is owned and operated by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission is well worthwhile. It is open from Tuesday through Sunday from 10AM to 4PM at 1985 Corporal Frank Scott Drive, College Park, MD. Tel: 301-864-6029. To celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, all admission fees are currently waived!
Very nice article, David! And I just published my first post this morning. It's CFI Corner, as I am a long time Certified Flight Instructor, or CFI. :) I see that the pictures on Substack are BIG! I'm wondering if there is a way to shrink them?
John