Tulsa International Airport is a civil-military airport five miles (8 km) northeast of Downtown Tulsa, in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, United States. It was named Tulsa Municipal Airport when the city acquired it in 1929;Tulsa Preservation Commission "Transportation (1850–1945)." Retrieved January 14, 2011. it received its present name in 1963. It includes a 45,000-square-foot Customs facility, which allows direct commercial international flights starting with Mexico.
The 138th Fighter Wing of the Oklahoma Air National Guard is based at the co-located Tulsa Air National Guard Base.138th Fighter Wing, Oklahoma Air National Guard – History. Accessed January 27, 2011. The airport is also the global maintenance headquarters for American Airlines.
During World War II Air Force Plant No. 3 was built on the southeast side of the airport, and Douglas Aircraft manufactured several types of aircraft there. After the war this facility was used by Douglas (later McDonnell Douglas) and Rockwell International (later Boeing) for aircraft manufacturing, modification, repair, and research. Spirit AeroSystems currently builds commercial airline parts for Boeing aircraftSpirit AeroSystems in part of the building and IC Bus Corporation assembles school buses in the other part. Spirit AeroSystems also builds Boeing wing and floor beam parts and Gulfstream wing parts in a facility on the east side of the airport, just north of runway 26.
The Tulsa Air and Space Museum is on the northwest side of the airport.
History Duncan A. McIntyre, an early aviator and native of New Zealand, moved to Tulsa in 1919. His first airport was located at Apache and Memorial and opened August 22, 1919.Thoburn, Joseph & Wright, Muriel. Oklahoma A History of The State and Its People, Vol. 4, Page 461 He moved and established a private airport on an 80-acre tract at the corner of Admiral Place and Sheridan Avenue. McIntyre Field had three hangars to house 40 aircraft and a beacon for landings after sundown.Jones, Kim. Aviation in Tulsa and Northeastern Oklahoma. 2009. . Available through Google Books. Retrieved January 17, 2011.
McIntyre evidently closed his airport during the 1930s and merged it with R. F. Garland, a Tulsa oil man and owner of the Garland Airport at 51st and Sheridan Road for $350,000. He ran the airport and became the president of the new venture. This airport would later become the Brown Airport (after a number of owners and names including the commercial airport before it moved to 61st and Yale). In 1940, McIntyre accepted a position with Lockheed Corporation and moved to California.
Charles Lindbergh landed at McIntyre Field on September 30, 1927. He had been persuaded to visit Tulsa by William G. Skelly, who was then president of the local Chamber of Commerce, as well as a booster of the young aviation industry. In addition to being a wealthy oilman and founder of Skelly Oil Company, Skelly founded Spartan Aircraft Company. Lindbergh had already landed at Oklahoma City Municipal Airport, Bartlesville Municipal Airport and Muskogee's Hatbox Field. All of these were superior to the privately owned McIntyre Field. Lindbergh pointed this out at a banquet given that night in his honor.
Opening The initial municipal airport was financed with a so-called "stud horse note", a promissory note like those used by groups of farmers or horse breeders who would collectively underwrite the purchase of a promising stud horse. The note would be retired with the stud fees paid for use of the horse. In the case of the Tulsa airport, the note would be paid from airport fees. Using this vehicle, Skelly obtained signatures from several prominent Tulsa businessmen who put up $172,000 to buy for a municipal airport. It opened July 3, 1928. The city of Tulsa purchased the airport, then named Tulsa Municipal Airport, in 1929, and put its supervision under the Tulsa Park Board. Charles W. Short was appointed Airport Director in 1929, and remained in this position until 1955.
The first terminal building was a one-story wood and tar paper structure that looked like a warehouse. The landing strips and taxiways were mown grass. Still, it handled enough passengers in 1930 for Tulsa to claim that it had the busiest airport in the world. The Tulsa Municipal Airport handled 7,373 passengers in February 1930 and 9,264 in April. This outpaced Croydon Airport, Berlin Tempelhof Airport, and Paris Le Bourget Airport for those months. Braniff Airways stopped at Tulsa on its original route between Chicago and Wichita Falls, and TWA stopped at Tulsa on its original route between Columbus and Los Angeles. Later in the 1930s, Tulsa became a stop on the American Airlines Chicago-Dallas route.
In 1932 the city opened a more elegant Art Deco terminal topped with a control tower, designed by Frederick V. Kershner, a lead architect working for Leon B. Senter. The structure was masonry with rounded corners, resulting in a futuristic appearance. Charles Short decorated the inside walls with a collection of early aviation photographs.
Although many Tulsans had concluded that the 1932 terminal was inadequate to serve the rapidly-growing city by the mid-1950s, the 1932 building served until Tulsa had to construct a new terminal, east of the old facility. The new terminal would be designed by noted architect Robert Lawton Jones, who later said that his design was inspired by Mies van der Rohe Terminal design work began in November 1958 and the completed building opened November 16, 1961; on August 28, 1963, the facility was renamed Tulsa International Airport. The 1932 terminal was demolished in 1969 to make way for a runway expansion project. In January 1928 Skelly bought the Mid-Continent Aircraft Company of Tulsa and renamed it the Spartan Aircraft Company. It first built a two-seat biplane, the Spartan C3 at its facility near the new airport. Later it would also build a low-wing cabin monoplane as a corporate aircraft, and the NP-1, a naval training plane used in World War II. In 1929 Spartan established the Spartan School of Aeronautics across Apache street from the new Tulsa airport to train fliers and support personnel. The Spartan School was activated by the U. S. Army Air Corps (USAAC) on August 1, 1939, as an advanced civilian pilot training school to supplement the Air Corps' few flying training schools. The Air Corps supplied students with training aircraft, flying clothes, textbooks, and equipment. The Air Corps also put a detachment at each school to supervise training. Spartan furnished instructors, training sites and facilities, aircraft maintenance, quarters, and mess halls.
World War II The 138th Fighter Wing of the Air National Guard was organized at the Tulsa Airport in 1940 as the 125th Observation Squadron, then renamed when it deployed overseas during World War II. It is still based at TUL.
On January 4, 1941, the War Department announced that Tulsa would be the site of a $15 million plant. The Federal Government built Air Force Plant No. 3 on the east side of the airport. The plant was operated by Douglas Aircraft Corporation to manufacture, assemble and modify bombers for the USAAF from 1942 to 1945; production was suspended when World War II ended.
Postwar In 1946 American Airlines acquired two former Air Force hangars to start a maintenance and engineering base at Tulsa Municipal Airport. In 1947, when transcontinental flights made at least one stop, American had nonstops from Tulsa to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Air Force Plant No. 3 was reactivated in 1950 to produce the Boeing B-47 Stratojet and later the Douglas B-66 Destroyer.
The April 1957 OAG shows 20 weekday departures on American, 18 Braniff, 6 Continental, 6 Central and 4 TWA. American had a DC-7 nonstop to New York, but westward nonstops didn't get past Oklahoma City, Wichita and Dallas.
In the late 1960s McDonnell Douglas, the successor to Douglas Aircraft Corporation, continued to use Air Force Plant No. 3 for aircraft maintenance. Rockwell International leased part of the plant to manufacture aerospace products.
In 1967 the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust (TAIT) was established as a public trust to build, operate, and maintain airport facilities for the city of Tulsa. TAIT has no authority to levy taxes and depends on airport revenues to repay airport-related debts. TAIT is independent of the city, but all board members are appointed by the Mayor of Tulsa and confirmed by the City Council. In October 1978 TAIT leased Tulsa International Airport and other city aviation facilities (other than police and fire heliports) to the city of Tulsa acting through the Tulsa Airport Authority (TAA), which agreed to disburse all airport-related income to TAIT. In 1979 the airport was also served by Frontier Airlines, Scheduled Skyways and Texas International Airlines. In July 1989, a lease amendment gave daily airport operation and maintenance responsibility to the TAA.
McDonnell Douglas terminated its lease of Air Force Plant No. 3 in 1996. Boeing bought Rockwell International's aerospace business in 1996, and took over much of the facility for aerospace manufacturing.
The Tulsa Air and Space Museum (TASM) was established in 1998 on the northwest side of the airport. The museum added the James E. Bertelsmeyer Tulsa planetarium in 2006.
In December 2000 TAIT guaranteed a loan to Great Plains Airlines in cooperation with the Tulsa Industrial Authority (TIA), the Bank of Oklahoma and the city of Tulsa. The TIA mortgaged Air Force Plant No. 3 for $30 million, which was loaned to Great Plains, and TAIT agreed to purchase the property if the airline defaulted. Great Plains went bankrupt in January 2004 and was unable to repay $7.1 million of the loan, but the loan guarantee was deemed to violate Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) policies prohibiting an airport authority from subsidizing a particular airline, and when the Bank of Oklahoma tried in June 2004 to collect the debt, TAIT declined to purchase the property from the TIA. The TIA promptly sued TAIT for violating the agreement and later added the city of Tulsa to the lawsuit in June 2008. The parties tried to settle the suit in August 2008 by repaying the TIA with $7.1 million of city funds, but this was challenged by a taxpayer group in a qui tam action, and the settlement was deemed illegal in October 2011 by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The TIA and the Bank of Oklahoma then sued TAIT for breach of contract in March 2013, seeking $15.6 million ($7.1 million in 2004 plus interest). The dispute was finally settled on 31 August 2015 with TAIT agreeing to pay $1.56 million to the TIA and the Bank of Oklahoma's parent company and $125,000 to the Tulsa Regional Chamber.
2010-Pre COVID-19 Allegiant Air began service in 2013 to Orlando/Sanford. In 2015 Allegiant also began service to Las Vegas, Los Angeles International Airport, and St. Petersburg/Clearwater in 2015. TUL also saw a completed terminal renovation in 2015. Allegiant Air has had routes come and go such as New Orleans, Baltimore, and Nashville. Frontier Airlines returned once again in 2018 after pulling out of TUL a decade prior and began year-round service to Denver International Airport. Frontier also has been a victim of short lived routes in this timeframe such as Washington Dulles, San Jose (CA), Orlando, and San Diego. Former Regional Carrier Via Air served TUL with nonstop service to Austin from 2018 to 2019. American Airlines reunited year-round service to Los Angeles in April 2019 after the route was cut in the late 2000s. Allegiant Air began seasonal service to Destin/Fort Walton Beach in June 2019. During this time frame Runway construction took place along with the return of a jet bridge to gate B9 for Frontier's return.
COVID-19