In April 1966, Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes flew to Wapakoneta to welcome home a 35-year-old astronaut who had just docked his capsule with an unmanned target in orbit. While he was in town, Rhodes announced the county would build an airport with the astronaut's name on it.
A Pirep featured story · KAXV Neil Armstrong Airport, Wapakoneta, OH
In April 1966, Ohio Governor James Rhodes flew to Wapakoneta to welcome home a 35-year-old Auglaize County native who had just done something nobody in history had done: docked two spacecraft in orbit. Neil Armstrong, on his first spaceflight, had flown Gemini 8 to the world's first docking with the unmanned Agena target on March 16, 1966. Hours later a stuck thruster sent the joined spacecraft spinning toward one revolution per second; Armstrong wrestled it under control and brought the capsule down in an emergency splashdown in the western Pacific.
At the homecoming on April 13, Rhodes announced that Auglaize County would get an airport carrying Armstrong's name. It took some doing. Fundraising started that summer; the first site failed in October when a television tower turned up too close; in December the committee settled on the existing New Knoxville airfield, a strip local businessmen had incorporated back in 1955. Ground broke for a 4,000-foot runway in July 1967, and Neil Armstrong Airport was dedicated that October 8. Twenty-one months later, the man it was named for stepped off the lunar module Eagle onto the Moon.
Armstrong had grown up in Wapakoneta, riding his bicycle out to watch airplanes at the Port Koneta airfield on the edge of town, then working odd jobs to pay for lessons there in an Aeronca Champion. He held a student pilot's license at sixteen, a year before a driver's license. Purdue for aeronautical engineering; F9F Panthers off the USS Essex over Korea, 78 combat missions and one ejection; the X-15 at Edwards; NASA's astronaut corps in 1962.
The airport is still a modest one: a single 5,500-foot asphalt runway, lengthened twice since. Fifteen minutes away in Wapakoneta, the Armstrong Air & Space Museum opened on July 20, 1972, the third anniversary of the moonwalk; it holds Gemini 8 itself, a moon rock, and the actual Aeronca Champion Armstrong learned to fly in. Since 2025 an engine from the Learjet 28 he flew to world records has been on loan to the airport itself. Land on the runway with his name on it; the airplane that started him is up the road.