When the excitement of manned flight swept America after World War I, McMinnville was no laggard in finding its place in the skies.
An estimated 10,000 eager visitors showed up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony when Warren County Memorial Airport opened for regular operations in 1949, Jared Bryson told The Rotary Club of McMinnville at its Thursday luncheon. It was the largest single-event gathering to date in Warren County history.
“Here in McMinnville and Warren County you can be proud of your history in aviation,” the Rotary speaker offered as the century-old civic club was observing the upcoming anniversary of man’s first sustained flight in a heavier-than-air machine. That was the Wright Brothers’ breakthrough success — 12 seconds in the air, reaching an altitude of 10 feet over the sand dunes on the North Carolina coast on Dec. 17, 1903.
Bryson serves as development director for the College of Basic and Applied Sciences at Middle Tennessee State University, where he is also studying toward the PhD in public history.
MTSU ranks in the top-five aviation education and training centers in the world, with some 1,100 students, 900 of them in the professional pilot track, Bryson, a McMinnville resident, told the Rotarians and their guests.
“There are about 14,000 openings a year for commercial pilots. Only about 6,000 trained, certified pilots are ready for those jobs, so they can pretty much write their own ticket in the airline industry.”
Building on the success of the Wright Brothers’ early flying machines, the development of more practical and efficient airplanes came just in time for aerial reconnaissance and bombing of targets in The Great War, World War I.
When the war ended in 1918, domestic airmail and parcel transport became a major driver in aviation progress, Bryson related.
But with increasing air traffic there followed an increase in airplane accidents and casualties. Neighboring Smithville became a site for an emergency landing field for problem-stricken planes, he noted.
Among the curiosities in the early history of flight was Edward Huffaker of Knoxville. Newly graduated with a university degree in engineering, Huffaker met up with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk NC. Brash, obnoxious and unbathed for many days, he was generally repellant. But his education in mathematics proved critical to the understanding of fluid dynamics and the performance of airplane wings, Bryson explained.
Orville and Wilbur held their noses long enough to glean some crucial ideas from Huffaker as they made progress toward a successful flying machine. Thereafter, the malodorous engineer seems to have been lost in history.
“The Wright brothers probably would not have gotten off the ground without the work of this Tennessean,” the speaker suggested.
In 1945, Tallman Boyd, who served many years as Warren County road superintendent, opened the first regular-service airfield in Warren County, located south of McMinnville in an area between Covenant School and the Bridgestone Warren Plant near Morrison. That operation continued until 1949, when Warren County Memorial Airport became the publicly owned aviation facility.
Bryson took a moment in his Rotary presentation to recognize Rotarian Kelly Basham and his mother, Patricia, both of whom are licensed pilots. The speaker praised them, and Frank Basham, Patricia’s late husband, as “McMinnville aviation royalty.”
Bryson expands on his Rotary address in a half-hour interview airing this week on McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI. That conversation can be heard at 91.3 FM Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Thursday at 1 p.m.
