The Movie Stars Who Started an Airline

Falcon Field opened in September 1941 as a Royal Air Force training base — months before Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the war. The British couldn't train pilots safely at home, and the United States, technically neutral, ran a network of contract civilian fields to do the work for them. Mesa got Falcon. The first British cadets arrived in Stearman PT-17s a week after the runway was paved.

The Hollywood part comes after the war. In 1946, producer Leland Hayward and pilot Jack Connelly looked at the surplus military fields scattered across the Southwest and decided to start an airline. They needed money. They went to their friends. Henry Fonda put in. Fred Astaire put in. Ginger Rogers put in. Jimmy Stewart — who had flown B-24s out of England as a real combat pilot, twenty missions over occupied Europe — put in. Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote "Stardust" and "Georgia on My Mind," put in. Southwest Airways was born with a stockholder list that read like an Academy Awards ballot.

The airline flew DC-3s out of Falcon Field along the West Coast for two decades, eventually becoming Pacific Air Lines, then merging into what became Hughes Airwest, then absorbed by Republic, then absorbed by Northwest, then absorbed by Delta. The Hollywood money is somewhere in there if you trace the equity back far enough.

Falcon Field itself never stopped flying. Twenty-three British cadets, one American, and four instructors are buried in the Mesa City Cemetery from training accidents. The original 1941 hangars were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. CAE Oxford Aviation Academy — the world's largest flight school — trains cadets from Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, and Vietnam off the same runway today. CAF Airbase Arizona keeps a flying B-17G named "Sentimental Journey" on the south ramp. Land here and you're landing on a field that Henry Fonda helped pay for.