Wings Over Cowtown: Fort Worth's Aviation Trail

Few cities took to the sky as eagerly as Fort Worth. From a 1911 demonstration flight at a downtown racetrack, the city — pushed hard by publisher Amon G. Carter — turned itself into one of the great aviation towns of the country: World War I training fields, an early municipal airport, a pioneering air-mail terminal, and, in World War II, a mile-long bomber plant that built thousands of B-24 Liberators. This driving tour traces that arc across Tarrant County, from the site of Fort Worth's first powered flight to Meacham Field, the wartime Army air field and the Convair plant on the west side, and the legacy of Medal of Honor pilot Horace Carswell, for whom the base was renamed. It's a long loop with wide-flung stops; treat it as a half-day drive through the places that earned Cowtown its second nickname — an aviation capital.