This Kansas City airport was once deemed the ‘most dangerous major airport’ in America
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The greatest American hero of the day, Charles Lindbergh, came to town in 1927 to help dedicate Kansas City’s first commercial airport.
The location, a sliver of land just north of the Missouri River, was known colloquially as Peninsula Air Field and officially as New Richards Air Field.
That name was soon changed to Municipal Airport, and new terminal buildings were erected on the site. In 1931, Trans World Airlines, TWA, set up shop in the airport, and later moved its world headquarters to what is now the Crossroads Arts District.
No carrier of the era did more to help bring air travel into the mainstream, to the point that Municipal was sometimes called the “Air Hub of America.”
Business was brisk for the next few decades; but as the volume, and size, of air traffic increased, the airport’s logistics proved increasingly problematic. In 1961 an FAA memo labeled it America’s “most dangerous major airport” because it sat so close to the downtown skyline.
After Kansas City International opened in 1972, Municipal continued to serve a sizable number of private and corporate customers (including Air Force One) as the Kansas City Downtown Airport. In 2002, it was renamed to honor Mayor Charles B. Wheeler.
TWA is, of course, long gone, and the terminal buildings shown in the postcard were “updated” in the 1950s. But the old airport’s close connection to the city that towers above it is still clearly visible in the same view today.
Looking for more Kansas City history?
It had a rocket on top: the cool old TWA headquarters
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Concrete for the airport runways was just one of Tom Pendergast’s legacies
During WWII, the Missouri River also carried landing craft
This story was originally published July 26, 2023 at 5:30 AM.