In 1928 a Minneapolis stunt pilot named Charles "Speed" Holman put a biplane through 1,433 consecutive loops in five hours to set a world record. Three years later he was dead and St. Paul had renamed its airport for him.
A Pirep featured story · KSTP St. Paul Downtown / Holman Field, St. Paul, MN
Charles Willis Holman was born in Minneapolis in 1898 — five years before Kitty Hawk — and came of age in the era when American aviation belonged to barnstormers. He wing-walked, parachuted, jumped from airplane to airplane in flight. He was an airmail pilot. He won America's first transcontinental air race from New York to Spokane in September 1927, four months after Lindbergh (who grew up 100 miles north, in Little Falls) flew the Atlantic. By 1929 he was the first pilot hired by Northwest Airways — and its operations manager.
His nickname was Speed. In January 1928 a local rival named Gene Shank set a world record for consecutive loops in an airplane: 515. Holman knew he could beat that. On February 13, over Wold-Chamberlain field across the river in Minneapolis, he flew 1,093. A French pilot named Fronval immediately broke that with 1,111. Holman went up again on March 17 with 100 gallons of gas in the tank and his pride on the line, and over the next five hours put the biplane through 1,433 consecutive loops in front of a small Minnesota crowd. The record stood for years.
On May 17, 1931, at the air show opening the new Omaha Municipal Airport, Holman flew an impromptu aerobatic routine — low, fast, the way the crowds liked. He didn't pull out in time. He was 32. His funeral was reportedly attended by more than 100,000 people. Within weeks, the City of St. Paul renamed its municipal airfield on the east bank of the Mississippi for him. It has been Holman Field ever since.
A second chapter, less famous but more consequential, came eleven years later. In 1942 the Army Air Forces took the airport over for the war and built a modification center on the field. Ford was building B-24 Liberator bombers and B-25 Mitchells at its Willow Run plant in Detroit. They flew the new airframes to St. Paul, where Northwest Airlines employees — up to 5,000 of them, on civilian payroll, in the middle of a Midwestern city — installed the combat equipment: gun turrets, oxygen systems, communications gear, and on some Liberators the highly classified H2X bombing-through-cloud radar that made daylight precision bombing possible over a Europe permanently socked in by weather. The Holman Field Administration Building from 1939 and the Riverside Hangar from 1942 are both still on the field today, both on the National Register of Historic Places.
In August 1944 the city turned Holman Field over to the new Metropolitan Airports Commission. Today it is the downtown reliever airport for the Twin Cities — corporate jets, the Minnesota Army National Guard, transient general aviation — sitting in a horseshoe bend of the Mississippi River with the St. Paul skyline rising directly off the runway. The classified radar got installed on a hangar floor here. Speed Holman's 1,433 loops were flown over the runway just across the river.