Ellington Field: A Century of Military Aviation

One airfield on Houston's southeast side has trained military aviators for more than a hundred years. Ellington Field opened in 1917 as one of dozens of Army flying schools rushed into service when the United States entered the First World War, and it never really stopped: it trained pilots and bombardiers through two World Wars, served as an Air Force base through the Cold War, and today shares its runways among Air Force Reserve, National Guard, Coast Guard, and NASA aircraft. It is where Apollo-era astronauts learned to fly the T-38 jets they still train in. This driving tour circles the field and its edges, tracing that century of flight from the WWI gate to the space program's flight line to the Lone Star Flight Museum, which moved here in 2017. It's an active military and civil airfield, so respect all posted signs and stay outside restricted areas.