Grand Prairie Airfield
Grand Prairie, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(U. S. Navy Flight Training Facility) The Curtiss Flying Service Corporation of New York purchased 275 acres of land one mile west of the Grand Prairie city limits in 1929. The Curtiss Wright Airport of Fort Worth-Dallas was opened on this site in 1930. Though the airport and flying school were a sensation, they closed late in 1930 due to the Depression and the field became the Grand Prairie Municipal Airport. In 1940 Lou Foote purchased the property to establish his own flying school. The U. S. Navy chose the airfield as a primary training facility and purchased the land from Foote in June 1942 for $120,336. The naval development cost was approximately $823,000 which included two 1,500-foot hexagon landing mats, two personnel barracks, a hangar, new maintenance and operations buildings, roadways, sidewalks and utilities. About 1,000 men trained on this site during World War II, some flying at night without permanent landing lights. The field was regarded as an excellent training ground for its capabilities. At the close of World War II, the Navy discontinued its training operations at the Grand Prairie site, using it instead as an emergency landing field. In 1953 the Navy authorized the Department of the Army to use the installation for the air section (later the 149th Aviation Battalion) of the 49th Armored Division of the Texas National Guard. In 1962 the Army authorized the City of Grand Prairie to use 195 acres as a public airport. The city sold 127 acres in 1964 and built a larger airport south of this site. The 19th Aviation Battalion remained until 1976, when the airfield was closed. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Curtiss Flying Service bought this Grand Prairie tract in 1929 and opened an airport and flying school in 1930, only to see it shuttered within the year by the Depression. Aviator Lou Foote revived it as a flying school before the U.S. Navy bought the field in 1942 and built it into a primary flight-training facility, where about 1,000 men learned to fly during World War II, some practicing night landings without permanent lights. After the war the field passed to the Texas National Guard and the Army before closing in 1976.
Why it matters
It is a piece of the vast home-front training infrastructure that turned ordinary young Americans into the aviators of World War II.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Grand Prairie Airfield was born in the brief, dazzling dawn of American commercial aviation. When the Curtiss Flying Service bought 275 acres here in 1929 and opened its airport in 1930, flight was still a marvel — barely two decades past the first powered flights, and only a few years after Lindbergh's 1927 Atlantic crossing had turned the whole country airplane-mad. New airports and flying schools were opening as fast as money could build them.
But 1929 is also a fateful year: the stock market crashed that October, and the Great Depression was closing in as the airport opened its gates. The marker captures the whiplash exactly — a "sensation" that shut its doors late in 1930, undone by the Depression. What had been a glamorous private venture became, more modestly, the Grand Prairie Municipal Airport.
Then came the transformation that gives this ground its lasting importance. As the United States was drawn toward the Second World War, the nation faced an enormous problem: it needed to turn tens of thousands of ordinary young men into military pilots, fast. Airfields all across the country — many of them, like this one, modest civilian strips — were pulled into a vast training machine. This quiet Texas field became one small gear in it.
People & events
The human hinge of this story is the aviator Lou Foote. In 1940 he bought the property to establish his own flying school — a private airman keeping the field alive in the years just before the war. That kind of individual persistence is easy to overlook, but it kept the runway usable and the site in play when the military came looking.
And the military did come. The U.S. Navy chose this airfield as a primary training facility and bought the land from Foote in June 1942 for $120,336 — a precise figure the marker preserves. The Navy then poured roughly $823,000 into development: two 1,500-foot hexagon landing mats, two barracks, a hangar, maintenance and operations buildings, roads, sidewalks, and utilities. Almost overnight, a small private strip became a purpose-built training base.
About 1,000 men trained here during World War II. The detail that lingers is that some of them flew at night without permanent landing lights — a glimpse of just how demanding and improvised this training could be, and how much nerve it asked of very young pilots. The field earned a reputation as excellent training ground. After the war the Navy wound down its flight operations, keeping the site as an emergency landing field, and in 1953 opened it to the Texas National Guard and later the Army, whose aviation units flew from here until the airfield finally closed in 1976.
Its place in the American story
This field is a tangible piece of the American home front — the enormous, largely invisible infrastructure that won the Second World War as surely as any battlefield. Victory in the air did not begin overseas; it began at hundreds of training fields like this one, where raw recruits were made into aviators before they ever saw combat.
The numbers here are small on their own — about 1,000 men — but multiply that by the many fields scattered across Texas and the country and you begin to grasp the scale of the effort. The United States built an air force nearly from scratch, and it did so by requisitioning and expanding ordinary local airports, spending public money at a pace that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier during the Depression that had shuttered this very field.
The site's long afterlife is meaningful too. Its passage from Navy to Texas National Guard to Army aviation, and finally to civilian municipal use, mirrors the whole postwar arc: wartime installations demobilized, repurposed, and gradually handed back to their communities. In this single tract you can read the Depression, the war, the Cold War military that followed, and the ordinary civic life that reclaimed the land — all in one place.
If you visit
Come to this marker ready to see with imagination, because what it commemorates is mostly gone. The hexagon landing mats, the barracks, the hangar — the physical base the Navy built in 1942 — belong to the past, and the ground has moved on to other uses. What you are really visiting is a layered site where a 1930 airport, a wartime training base, and a later civilian field all occupied the same earth.
Let the plaque's specifics anchor you: the 275 acres, the $120,336 the Navy paid Foote, the roughly 1,000 men who trained here. Standing in the wide, flat openness that made this good flying country in the first place, picture trainer aircraft in the pattern overhead and student pilots feeling their way down onto a darkened field without permanent lights. That image is the whole point of the stop.
For a road trip, this belongs on a route tracing aviation and World War II home-front history across Texas — the training fields, aircraft plants, and military installations that turned the region into an arsenal. It's a short stop, but a resonant one: a reminder that the great drama of the 1940s was rehearsed, first, on quiet local ground like this.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Lou Foote
Related events
- · World War II
Themes & tags
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