Ingram's March 2023

The rich history created by aviation pioneers a century ago has become the foundation of a powerful manufacturing sector in the Sunflower State. Aviation and Aerospace: Manufacturing Takes Wing in Kansas

T he names are legendary, iconic, historical, and contemporary, and they are all part of a proud legacy Kansas boasts in commercial aviation and aerospace research and development: Boeing, Cessna, Beech- craft, and Learjet, and later, Bom bardier and Raytheon. Missing from that roster: Longren. Before Wichita would stake its claim as the Air Capital of the World, build ing more than half the light planes on the planet, an enterprising soul named Albin Kasper Longren mount ed an internal-combustion engine to a mass of canvas and wood to pro duce the first successful plane made in the state: The Longren Flyer. That was just seven years after the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk. Longren never made it big as a plane maker, but he went on to help design and manufacture aircraft, with some of his advances still shaping the industry today. His work helped pave the way for young aviation pioneers like Walter Beech, Clyde Cessna, and Lloyd Stearman, who would go on to

set up shop in Wichita. There, they pushed the boundaries of design and functionality even further in the 1920s by producing single-wing monoplane and biplane designs, then began to transition to metal frames and planes with multiple engines. A century later, their legacy has translated into an industry that em ploys more than 42,000 Kansans in The thousands of aviation jobs in Wichita are just a start for Kansas—more than 450 precision machine shops, and tool and die shops are within 200 miles of the city. manufacturing and supporting roles, with a combined annual payroll of more than $2 billion, according to an economic-impact assessment conduc ted by Burns & McDonnell. Since 1919, an estimated 70 percent of the

world’s embedded aircraft have been produced in Wichita. Of the state’s roughly $12 billion in annual exports, aviation products account for $2.3 bil- lion, and that manufacturing sector throws off nearly $9.5 billion in over all economic impact. Reaching Critical Mass In 1925, Stearman, Cessna, and Beech collaborated to form Travel Air Manufacturing, just 15 years after Albin Longren’s first flight. That set the stage for spectacular advances in aviation design. By the time another 15 years had passed, with the United States on the threshold of entering a world war, Kansas had become the aerial arsenal of democracy. Assembly lines in the state’s two largest cities, manned by tens of thousands of workers—many of whom weren’t men at all—turned out the majority of the bombers that attacked Axis targets during World War II. The plant in Kansas City’s Fairfax district turned out two-thirds of the

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