December 17, 1925 — the 22nd anniversary of Kitty Hawk — at a riverside Cincinnati airfield that floods
On December 17, 1925, exactly 22 years after Kitty Hawk, two men walked into a wood-frame office at a thousand-acre municipal airfield in Cincinnati and signed the papers forming the Embry-Riddle Company. T. Higbee Embry was a young Cincinnatian; John Paul Riddle was a transplanted Kentuckian who had taught him to fly. They hauled air mail on one of the country's earliest contract routes and taught flying; the school they founded at Lunken grew into Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, today the largest aviation university in the world.
They were not Lunken's only story. Aeronca Aircraft Corporation was founded on the field in 1928 and built its C-2 and C-3 light planes there; affordable two-seaters that put a generation of Americans into cockpits for the first time. Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Lunken in 1927 to refuel and was mobbed by Cincinnatians. At the 1930 dedication, a three-day celebration that drew 25,000 people, Jimmy Doolittle flew the stunts and Howard Hughes handed out the trophies with Jean Harlow at his side.
The river had the last word. In January 1937 the Ohio crested near 80 feet and submerged everything but the top of the control tower; the flood destroyed the Aeronca factory, sent airplane parts floating downriver, and pushed the company to Middletown, where it built on. A single black brick on the tower still marks the high-water line, and locals call the field "Sunken Lunken" to this day. KCVG opened across the river in 1947 and took the airline traffic. The 1937 Art Deco terminal still stands, closed since 2022 and now being converted into a boutique hotel; the old control tower is beside it, right where it was when Lindbergh saw it.