Ninety days, give or take. That is roughly how long it took the Army and its civilian contractors to turn alfalfa fields north of town into Thunderbird Field II, which was activated on June 22, 1942, by the city’s account, its first class training at Thunderbird I in Glendale until the staff moved up on July 22 — barely half a year after Pearl Harbor. The new field joined a constellation of Valley flight schools (Thunderbird I in Glendale, Luke, Williams, Falcon), all chasing the same assets: flat land, empty sky, and around 300 flying days a year.
The field ran primary flight training in Stearman PT-17 biplanes, the yellow-and-blue trainers every WWII pilot remembered fondly and feared slightly. Cadets came from across the country — mainly U.S. Army aviation cadets; Southwest Airways’ Chinese and British programs were at Glendale and Mesa — and by the time the field closed in October 1944 about 5,500 had graduated over Scottsdale’s fields. For a town of about two thousand, the field meant jobs, boarders, dances, and a steady drone of engines above the same land where the cotton boom had raged twenty years earlier.
It also meant, though nobody put it this way at the time, a permanent line item in the town’s future. The site passed through surplus and civilian hands after the war and was bought by the city in 1966 and opened in 1967 as Scottsdale Municipal Airport; the Airpark that grew up around the runway is now one of Arizona’s largest employment centers. The story of opening day is at June 22, 1942, and the decade’s full arc is in the 1940s chapter.