The Country Club That Started AOPA

Wings Field opened in 1929 as the Philadelphia Aviation Country Club — a deliberately exclusive institution. Members paid dues, ate in the clubhouse, and tied down their Wacos and Stearmans in club hangars. The country-club model didn't survive the Depression intact, but the field did, and by 1939 it was home to a tight community of Philadelphia-area private pilots who flew because they could afford to and wanted to.

In April 1939, four of them — Joseph B. "Doc" Hartranft, Phil Love, Charles Hill, and Lawrence "Larry" Sperry — met for lunch at the Wings Field clubhouse. The conversation drifted, as pilots' conversations do, to grievances. The Civil Aeronautics Authority — the regulator that would become the FAA — had been drafting rules that the four felt clearly favored the airlines over private pilots. There was no organization representing the private flyer's interest in Washington. The airlines had the Air Transport Association. The manufacturers had what would become the General Aviation Manufacturers Association. The private pilot had no one.

They decided over lunch to start one. They named it the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. By the end of 1939, they had 600 members. By 1947, 18,000. By 1980, 250,000. Today AOPA has roughly 300,000 members and is the largest organization representing private pilots in the world. The headquarters is now in Frederick, Maryland, but the founding documents reference Wings Field and the country-club lunch.

Wings Field still operates as a public-use airport — single runway 6/24 at 3,361 feet, no tower, surrounded by suburban Philadelphia. The original 1929 clubhouse is gone; the modern terminal sits roughly where the country-club building stood. AOPA holds a 75th-anniversary commemoration here every five years. Land at KLOM and you're landing where four pilots over lunch decided the private flyer needed a voice — and built one that's still talking.