Columbus's airport began as a wartime school for pilots of one-way aircraft. The museum on the field remembers the men who flew gliders to war.
A Pirep featured story · KBAK Columbus Municipal, Columbus, IN
In 1942 the Army carved an airfield out of the Bartholomew County flatland, and it opened in February 1943 as Atterbury Army Air Field, named for Camp Atterbury fourteen miles northwest. It trained B-26 Marauder bomber crews and C-47 troop-carrier crews, and something rarer: combat glider pilots, along with the tow-plane crews who would haul them to war.
The glider pilot's trade was flying one-way aircraft. The Waco CG-4A carried thirteen troops or a jeep behind a tow plane on a rope, cut loose over the objective, and landed wherever the ground allowed; there was no engine, and there was no going around. At Atterbury the training worked up to it in stages that sound almost improvised now: students flew Schweizer training gliders, and instructors took L-4 liaison planes, little more than Piper Cubs, and shut the engine off in flight to practice the dead-stick descents that were the whole job. The gliders stationed here wore troop-carrier markings, and the type these men mastered went into Normandy and Holland, expended on arrival.
After the war the field became Bakalar Air Force Base, renamed in honor of Lieutenant John Bakalar, and hosted the 434th Troop Carrier Wing's reservists until the base stood down around 1970 and Columbus took over the field. The Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum now sits by the tower at KBAK, volunteer-run and dedicated to everyone who served here from 1942 to 1970. Inside are a CG-4A glider nose and glider bench seats found decades later in a Pennsylvania farmhouse attic; outside are a Tuskegee Airmen monument on Bakalar Green and an F-4 Phantom that arrived in 1988 slung beneath a helicopter. An hour on the ground covers it, and it is the rare museum where the field you landed on is the artifact.