McCook Field
Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
McCook Field Cradle of Aviation Innovation
The Story
In the years around World War I, the U.S. Army turned a stretch of Dayton floodplain into one of the nation's first centers for aviation research, fittingly located in the hometown of the Wright brothers. Through the late 1910s and 1920s, engineers here pushed the young science of flight forward, testing new aircraft, engines, and equipment and chasing altitude and speed records at a time when airplanes were still a novelty. As the work outgrew the cramped, flood-prone site, it moved to a larger field nearby that would eventually become Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Why it matters
This modest field was a proving ground where American aviation grew from wood-and-fabric experiment into a serious engineering discipline, seeding the military and industrial air power that would shape the century to come.
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