Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
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The Wright - Patterson Air Force Base (in short: Wright - Patterson AFB ) is a major base for the U.S. Air Force ( USAF) in Ohio, headquarters of the Air Force Materiel Command ( AFMC ) and location of the USAF Museum.
The base is located about 15 km northeast of Dayton and has a 3,840 m long main start and runway ( 05L/23R ).
With the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Aeronautical Systems Center at the base houses the most important research centers for weapons systems and basic research of the U.S. Air Force. A total of around 20,000 people work at the base, more than half of them are civilian employees.
History
Huffman Prairie
On the site of today's Air Force Base Wright brothers have taken many of their flight tests. After her spectacular maiden flight on 17 December 1903 in North Carolina, they looked for a test site located closer to their place of residence Dayton. They agreed the beginning of 1904 with the banker Torrence Huffman have the free use of an area northeast of the city, the Huffman Prairie, erected there a hangar for their improved model Flyer II and led to the end of 1904 over a hundred flights away with it. After the winter break, the tests in 1905 went with the new Flyer III on, but then rested for five years, where the Wright brothers took care of patents and promotional trips - including to Europe - took. 1910, the brothers opened on the site of a flight school: For $ 250 they offered a ten-day training included four flight hours. Two years later died Wilbur Wright and Orville 1915 ended flight operations there and moved immediately to the north of the city to Northfield. Here was the end of 1917, the U.S. Army down with their first aviation research department and changed the name to McCook Field, and also the current National Museum of the United States Air Force has its origin here.
Wright Field
The Huffman Prairie was eventually found in 1917 as part of a flood protection program under protection, while south of it was the new Wright Field. Thither went the army up in 1928, when her McCook Field was too small. On the new surface hangars, wind tunnels and test stands were built for propellers and engines. Since the mid- 1940s has the place over three arranged in a triangle slopes with a length of 1700-2180 meters.
Patterson Field
The northeastern part of the elongated Wright Field was given its own runway and was renamed in July 1931 in Patterson Field, in honor of Lieutenant Frank Stuart Patterson ( born November 6, 1897 in Dayton, Ohio), June 19, 1918, as tests with de Havilland DH4 crashed at this location. Both airfields initially remained independent, with the research institutions and the museum in their midst, until they were in 1945 merged organizationally.
Wright - Patterson Air Force Base
On January 13, 1948, the entire complex was given its present name Wright - Patterson Air Force Base. The orbits of the former Wright Field were closed in the 1960s for flight operations and serve since 1971 as open space for the Air Force Museum, while the north-eastern part as an Air Force base is used in the narrower sense.
On November 21, 1995, the Dayton Agreement was initialed on the premises, which ended the war in Bosnia between the Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims. It still forms the constitutional basis of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.