Urbana, OH
On-field diner in the terminal; window seats watch the runway, and the pies carry the reputation. Open Tuesday through Saturday 7 am to 8 pm, Sunday to 2:30, closed Mondays; one of the few airport cafes serving dinner. Next door, the Champaign Aviation Museum is building a B-17 from roughly three-quarters new parts, with a restored B-25 alongside; free admission, Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 4. The Grimes Flying Lab museum honors Warren Grimes, widely called the father of modern aviation lighting, and the city bills Grimes as the only US airport with three museums on the field. A Sunday run gets the cafe but not the museums.
Italian kitchen and coffeehouse at 13 Monument Square in downtown Urbana: pizza, pasta, espresso drinks, and desserts, with a dining room that runs dressier than the small-town address suggests; reservations help. Open Monday through Saturday from 11, closed Sundays. Walk the courthouse square after lunch.
Warren G. Grimes founded Grimes Manufacturing here in 1933 and built it into the company that supplied aircraft position lights to nearly every U.S. airliner and military aircraft for decades. The standard you still fly with — red on the left wing, green on the right, white tail — was a Grimes pattern that became FAA convention. The airport bears his name. Today the field is home to the Champaign Aviation Museum, one of the most active warbird restoration shops in America, where volunteers are rebuilding a B-17 Flying Fortress named "Champaign Lady" with the goal of returning her to flying status. The hangars are open; visitors can watch the work in progress. Annual Mid-East Regional Fly-In each July. Urbana itself is small-town western Ohio with a beautifully preserved town square — worth the short walk into town.
One of America's most active warbird restoration shops, located at Grimes Field in Urbana, OH. The signature project is the B-17 Flying Fortress "Champaign Lady" — a years-long restoration to flying status. Visitors can watch the work in progress in the open hangar. The museum also has a B-25 Mitchell, several T-6 Texans, and other aircraft. Open weekly with active volunteer mechanics happy to talk shop. A must-visit for warbird fans.
This quiet Union County field sits in the middle of an unlikely automotive capital. In 1982 Honda built the first Japanese-owned car plant on American soil here at Marysville — the first US-made Accord, "USA 001," rolled off the line on November 1 that year — and the complex has since grown into Ohio's largest employer. Northwest of the plant, near East Liberty, lies the Transportation Research Center: a 4,500-acre proving ground born from Ohio State engineering research in the early 1970s, anchored by a 7.5-mile high-speed test oval that is a genuine landmark from the air — a vast banked ring scribed into the farmland.
Kitty Hawk gets the monument, but Kitty Hawk was twelve seconds in a straight line. The airplane that could actually fly — turn, bank, circle, stay up — was perfected here. When the Wrights came home to Dayton in 1904, banker Torrence Huffman lent them his cow pasture rent-free, and across 1904 and 1905 they taught themselves to truly fly. On October 5, 1905, Wilbur circled this field more than 29 times in 39 minutes — the first sustained, controlled, practical flight in history. It became the Wright School of Aviation (1910–1916) and then the seed of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The 84-acre prairie is a unit of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park and a National Historic Landmark, with a replica 1905 hangar and launch catapult. The airplane it produced — the Wright Flyer III — is the one you'll find at Carillon. This is the ground where flight as we know it was invented.
Dayton, Ohio is where the Wright Brothers built and perfected their aircraft. Huffman Prairie Flying Field (part of Wright-Patterson AFB) is where they developed practical sustained flight in 1904-05 — arguably more important than the 12-second hop at Kitty Hawk. The National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson is the world's largest military aviation museum with 350+ aircraft. The Wright Brothers' bicycle shop downtown is preserved. This is the true birthplace of aviation.