Air Capital Arithmetic: How Wichita Earned the Name It Still Carries
More airplanes have been built in Wichita than anywhere else on Earth. The names on the hangars changed over a century — the workbench culture never did.
Wichita calls itself the Air Capital of the World, and for once the slogan is a statistic. Over the course of the 20th century, more than 300,000 aircraft were built in this city — more than in any other place on the planet — from Travel Air biplanes to the business jets that still roll out of hangars along the Arkansas River.
The industry took root in the 1920s, when oil money, flat land and distance from coastal competitors made Wichita a natural place to build airplanes. Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna and Lloyd Stearman all built companies here, and their surnames still shape the city's economy through Textron Aviation, which builds Cessna and Beechcraft aircraft, and Spirit AeroSystems, which fabricates major structures for commercial airliners.
The work is skilled and stubbornly local. Generations of Wichita families have machined, riveted, wired and inspected airplanes, and the city's technical schools and Wichita State University's aviation research programs feed the line with engineers and technicians.
Aviation employment rises and falls with the industry's cycles, and Wichita has absorbed its share of hard decades. What has not changed is the concentration: the factories, the suppliers, the flight-test runways and Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport all sit within a few miles of each other.
City and industry leaders continue to market that density — suppliers can drive a part across town faster than most cities can ship one — as Wichita competes for the next generation of aircraft work, from advanced air mobility to defense contracts.
Ask a Wichitan what the city makes and the answer comes fast. Airplanes first. Everything else after.
