World War I Wilbur Wright Field was established in 1917 for
World War I on of land adjacent to the
Mad River which included the 1910
Wright Brothers'
Huffman Prairie Flying Field and that was leased to the Army by the Miami Conservancy District. Logistics support to Wilbur Wright Field was by the adjacent
Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot established in January 1918 and which also supplied three other Midwest Signal Corps aviation schools. A Signal Corps Aviation School began in June 1917 for providing combat pilots to the
Western Front in France, and the field housed an aviation mechanic's school and an armorer's school. On 19 June 1918, Lt.
Frank Stuart Patterson at the airfield was testing machine gun/propeller synchronization when a tie rod failure broke the wings off his
Airco DH.4M while diving from . Also in 1918,
McCook Field near Dayton between Keowee Street and the
Great Miami River began using space and mechanics at Wilbur Wright Field. Following World War I, the training school at Wilbur Wright Field was discontinued. • 42d Aero Squadron, August 1917 : Redesignated Squadron "I"; October 1918-February 1919 • 44th Aero Squadron, August 1917 : Redesignated Squadron "K"; October 1918 : Redesignated Squadron "P"; November 1918-April 1919 • 231st Aero Squadron (II), April 1918 : Redesignated Squadron "A", July–December 1918; Assigned to Armorers' School • 246th Aero Squadron (II), May 1918 : Redesignated Squadron "L", October 1918-February 1919 • 342d Aero Squadron, August 1918 : Redesignated Squadron "M" October 1918 : Redesignated Squadron "Q" November 1918-April 1919 • 507th Aero Squadron, July 1918-April 1919 • 512th Aero Squadron (Supply), July 1918-April 1919 • 669th Aero Squadron (Supply), May 1918-April 1919 • 678th Aero Squadron (Supply), February 1918-April 1919 • 851st Aero Squadron, March 1918 : Re-designated Squadron "B" July 1918-April 1919 Combat units trained at Wilbur Wright Field In June 1923, an Air Service
TC-1 airship "was wrecked in a storm at Wilbur Wright Field" and by 1924, the field had "an interlock system" radio beacon using Morse code
command guidance (dash-dot "N" for port, dot-dash "A" for starboard) illuminating instrument board lights. The
Field Service Section at Wilbur Wright Field merged with McCook's
Engineering Division to form the
Materiel Division on 15 October 1926 ("moved to Wright Field when McCook Field closed in 1927"). The
Air Service's "control station for the model airway"—which scheduled military flights of the
Airways Section—moved to Wilbur Wright Field from McCook Field in the late 1920s (originally "at
Bolling Field until 1925").
Redesignations The Fairfield Air Depot formed when the leased area of Wilbur Wright Field and the Army-owned land of the
Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot merged soon after World War I. For an aerial war game of 1929, "Fairfield" was the headquarters of the Blue air force; a Blue "airdrome north of Dayton at Troy" was strafed on May 16 ("a raid on the airdrome at Fairfield" was later expected), "Dayton" was the May 21 takeoff site for a
round-trip bomber attack on New York, and "target areas at Fairfield" were used for live bombing on May 25. A
provisional division was "assembled at Dayton" on May 16, 1931, for maneuvers in which "Maj.
Henry H. Arnold, division G-4 (Supply), had stocks at Pittsburgh; Cleveland; Buffalo; Middletown, Pennsylvania; Aberdeen, Maryland; and Bolling Field to service units as they flew eastward." The depot remained active until 1946. By November 1930, "the laboratory at Wright Field" had planes fitted as flying laboratories (e.g.,
B-19 "flying laboratory" with "8-foot tires"), and the equipment of the
1929 Full Flight Laboratory (closed out by the
Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, which had established the principle of safe fog flying) was moved to Wright Field by the end of 1931.
Materiel Division’s Fog Flying Unit under First Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger used the equipment for blind landings.
Patterson Field Patterson Field, named for
Frank Stuart Patterson, was designated on 6 July 1931 as the area of Wright Field east of
Huffman Dam (including Fairfield Air Depot, Huffman Prairie, and Wright Field's airfield). Patterson Field became the location of the Materiel Division of the Air Corps and a key logistics center, and in 1935, quarters were built at Patterson Field, which in 1939 still "was without runways...heavier aircraft met difficulty in landing in inclement weather." Wright Field retained the land west of the Huffman Dam and became the
research and development center of the Air Corps.
Prewar events Engineering and flight activities of the two installations after the designation of Patterson Field included numerous aviation achievements and failures prior to the
bombing of Pearl Harbor:
AAF and USAF base The
Army Air Forces Technical Base was formed on December 15, 1945, when Wright Field, Patterson Field,
Dayton Army Air Field in
Vandalia and
Clinton County AAF in
Wilmington merged. After the USAF was created, the base was renamed
Air Force Technical Base in December 1947 and
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in January 1948.. The former Wright Field became Area B of the combined installation, the southern portion of Patterson Field became Area A, and the northern portion of Patterson Field, including the jet runway built in 1946–47, Area C. ==References==