Oklahoma City is the only American city where the airline airport and the GA reliever are named after two men who died in the same crash.
A Pirep featured story · KOKC Will Rogers World Airport, Oklahoma City, OK
There is no other American city where the airliner airport and the general aviation airport are named for two men who died in the same airplane crash. Oklahoma City has both.
On August 15, 1935, Wiley Post and Will Rogers took off from a lagoon south of Point Barrow, Alaska, in a hybrid Post had built that summer. He had grafted the wing of a wrecked Lockheed Explorer onto the fuselage of a Lockheed Orion and bolted on a pair of pontoons. The combination was nose-heavy and the test flight had been only a week earlier. They were trying to survey an air-mail route from the American West Coast to Russia.
Post was the most famous pilot in America. Two years earlier, in 1933, he had become the first person to fly solo around the world: eight days, fifteen hours, fifty-one minutes in a Lockheed Vega named the Winnie Mae. He had pioneered pressure-suit flying and the modern autopilot. He wore a black eye patch because an oil-field accident in 1926 had taken his left eye. The first money he ever spent on aviation was the workers'-compensation check from the injury.
Rogers was the most famous American, period. Cherokee Nation, vaudeville roper, newspaper columnist, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, the most-listened-to radio voice in the country. He had agreed to ride along to write about the trip.
On the takeoff after a stop to ask Inuit hunters for the direction to Barrow, the engine quit. The nose-heavy hybrid pitched into Walapka Bay from about fifty feet. Both men were killed instantly.
When the news reached the continental United States, movie theaters went dark for two minutes. Flags went to half-staff. Oklahoma had lost its favorite son, and the country had lost what was probably the best pilot in it.
Will Rogers was reinterred at his memorial in Claremore in 1944. Wiley Post is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Oklahoma City. The municipal airport on the south edge of town was renamed Will Rogers World Airport in 1941. The wartime auxiliary northwest of the city — Tulakes Field — eventually became the reliever and was renamed Wiley Post Airport. KOKC and KPWA. The passenger's airport, and the pilot's.