Vintage airplane, on display at KC airport for years, will be returned to owner
The Eaglet had landed.
The year was 1991. Gene Morris and his son, Ken, took turns at the controls of the vintage, single-engine plane for its final flight from Texas to Kansas City’s downtown airport.
Gene set down the American Eaglet for its final landing with KC’s skyline as the backdrop for what was a homecoming of sorts. Sixty years earlier, the skinny two-seater had rolled off the assembly line across the Missouri River at the former Fairfax Municipal Airport in Kansas City, Kansas.
The Morrises were there to donate the Eaglet that Gene had restored to the community where it was born. But there was one condition. It would forevermore need to be on public display.
Except things didn’t work out that way. And now because Kansas City could not hold up its end of the deal, Ken plans to rent a truck and haul the Eaglet home.
First the City Council needs to sign off on its return, but there’s no opposition and that deal should be sealed on Thursday afternoon.
“It’s not air worthy, because the wings are old, and they need to be looked at,” Ken said from his home in the suburbs of Rockford, Illinois. “And the engine is just the guts. There’s no engine in there, so it’s as it sits. It’s not worth that much, but it could be. It could be a good museum piece.”
Another Eaglet from the former KCK airplane plant is suspended from the ceiling at the Vintage Wings and Wheels Museum near Ken’s home in Poplar Grove, Illinois. His dad, who died two years ago, restored and donated that one, too.
Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport
The Kansas City Eaglet now sits in a dark, locked garage in a nondescript storage building on the west side of the downtown airport. It’s a few football fields north of the now-padlocked Airline History Museum where it once was on public display.
The plane’s yellow wing is stacked in two pieces along one wall like sheets of plywood. The blue fuselage is minus its propeller, which somehow or other was misplaced.
The Eaglet is a high- wing aircraft, meaning the wing is mounted above the fuselage. Only a relatively few were built. The first ones debuted in 1930, as the Great Depression throttled the world’s economy, and it was priced accordingly for the times. Eaglets sold for $1,395 apiece, which in today’s, inflation-adjusted dollars is slightly less than what it costs to buy a basic version of a mid-size SUV like the 2025 Subaru Outback.
For several years, the Morris family’s American Eaglet 230 - N291N Serial Number 1004 was a featured attraction at what until recently was known as Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport and has been renamed Kansas City Downtown Airport – Wheeler Field.
With its 34-foot wingspan, the craft fit nicely in the lobby of the main terminal building, which in 1996 became the headquarters of VML advertising.
“Nobody else in this city has an airplane in their lobby,” Scott McCormick, the M of VML told The Star’s Jennifer Mann Fuller at the time.
But the agency soon needed more space. So in 2000, the Eaglet was removed to accommodate VML’s expansion on its way to becoming one of the largest ad agencies in the world today.
The city’s aviation department faced a dilemma. How would it comply with Gene Morris’ requirement that the plane be displayed in public? The city had no indoor space big enough to display it. And leaving it outdoors wasn’t an option.
While the frames of the fuselage and tail are constructed from steel tubing, the wings and ailerons are wood, and the whole aircraft is wrapped in a synthetic fabric called Ceconite. While more durable than the original Irish linen that encased the wings when the KC Eaglet rolled out of the factory on Aug. 12, 1930, all fabrics will deteriorate over time from exposure to the sun.
Airline History Museum
In 2007, it found a home in the Airline History Museum in Hangar 9, said Rod DeWinkler, the airport’s executive manager. For years it resided beneath the wings of the venue’s star attraction, the 1959 Lockheed Super-G Constellation that actor John Travolta recently purchased, DeWinkler said.
But the museum closed three years ago over a dispute with its landlord, Signature Flight Support. And because it didn’t want to become involved in that fight, the city retrieved the Eaglet and stuck it in one of its storage garages.
To make it fit, the wing needed to come off.
“It was only four bolts,” DeWinkler said.
A City Council committee on Tuesday recommended that city give the Eaglet back to the Eugene E. Morris trust because, according to the ordinance authorizing the return, “it retains sentimental value to the Morris family,” DeWinkler said.
That it does, Ken said. A retired pilot for Delta Airlines, he hasn’t seen the Eaglet since the 1990s, when his flight crew had a layover in Kansas City.
“We drove right by the old terminal at downtown airport, and I could see it lit up down in the bottom.” he said. “That was kind of a neat deal.”
He was not happy to learn about the lost propeller when a reporter informed him of that in a text message on Tuesday afternoon.
“That sucks,” he said. “It’s probably over someone’s mantle,”
But with luck, maybe it will turn up before he rents that truck for the drive back to Illinois so that he and his wife, Lorraine, can put it back together.
“That would be great! he said.
This story was originally published May 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
