How a desert airbase trained 26,000 military pilots, closed, and became the busiest civilian flight school in America
A Pirep featured story · KIWA Mesa Gateway, Mesa, AZ
On February 24, 1942, the United States Army Air Forces renamed a 4-month-old training facility in the Arizona desert after First Lieutenant Charles Linton Williams, an Arizona native killed in 1927 when his Boeing PW-9A pursuit aircraft ditched a mile off Fort DeRussy, Oahu. Williams was 29. The field that took his name would, over the next 51 years, produce more military pilots than any other base in the country.
Williams Field trained AT-6 students through WWII. In 1948 it became the United States Air Force's first jet training base — the first place where new pilots went directly from prop trainers to jet aircraft as a deliberate program. In 1966 the Air Force chose Williams as the launching site for the new Undergraduate Pilot Training program, the standardized 53-week course that produced every USAF pilot from then forward. Between 1942 and the base's closure in 1993, Williams trained 26,000 pilots — more than any other USAF facility in history. Vietnam-era F-4 drivers learned to fly here. Cold War B-52 commanders learned to fly here.
The 1991 Base Realignment and Closure Commission shuttered Williams on the grounds that the Air Force had too much pilot-training capacity for a post-Cold-War force structure. The base closed in 1993. The runway, all 10,201 feet of it, sat empty.
Phoenix had a problem in 1993. Sky Harbor was saturated. The valley needed a reliever airport, and there was suddenly a perfect one sitting empty in Mesa. Williams Gateway opened in 1994, civilian, the runway extended for airliners. Allegiant started commercial service in 2007. Forty-plus aviation tenants moved in — ATP, AeroGuard, UND Aerospace, every major flight-school chain in the country. Phoenix-Mesa Gateway became one of the busiest flight training airports in the United States.
On December 17, 2024, after Phoenix withdrew from the airport authority, the board voted to rename the field again. It's just Mesa Gateway now. The Williams name came off the gates and went into the archive. But the runway is the same one Charles Linton Williams's namesake was carved into in 1942, and the 26,000 pilots who trained here include the instructors of half the airline captains flying in American airspace right now.