What was Thunderbird Field II?
Stand at the entrance to Scottsdale Airport and the yellow biplane on the pole is not decoration. It is a citation.
Thunderbird Field II was a primary flight training school the Army built on alfalfa and cotton ground several miles north of the Scottsdale townsite, in roughly ninety days, and opened on June 22, 1942. The arrangement was a wartime hybrid: civilian contractors did the instructing and ran the field, the Army Air Forces supervised and supplied the cadets. The contractor here was Southwest Airways, founded by the Hollywood agent Leland Hayward and John H. Connelly, who were already operating Thunderbird Field No. 1 in Glendale — hence the number.
Cadets learned on the Stearman PT-17, the yellow-and-blue open-cockpit biplane that every American military pilot of that generation remembers, in a ten-week course of about 65 flight hours and 109 hours of ground school. Primary training was the cut: solo or wash out. At the peak in November 1943 the field held 615 cadets, each flying about two hours a day, which worked out to something on the order of 1,845 takeoffs and landings daily on a field in the middle of nowhere. By the time the school was deactivated on October 16, 1944, more than 5,500 pilots had graduated — roughly three times the original plan.
Then the field refused to die. Arizona State Teachers College ran an aviation program on it, a Seventh-day Adventist academy owned it from 1953, and in 1966 the City of Scottsdale bought the whole thing for $750,000. The first business jets landed in August 1967. The runway cadets soloed on is the runway under today’s Gulfstreams, and the Airpark around it is now one of the largest employment centers in Greater Phoenix.
How to visit what’s left
Start at the memorial, and give it fifteen honest minutes. The Thunderbird Field II Veterans Memorial sits at the airport entrance, free and open air. Its centerpiece is a 1942 Boeing-Stearman PT-17 — the exact type flown here, retired from flying in May 2018 and mounted where everyone arriving at the airport has to look at it. Below it is a granite monument carrying the service plaques of all the armed forces plus the POW-MIA plaque, and two large touchscreen kiosks with video and photographs covering the field, the airport and the veterans. Read the kiosks. They are the closest thing to a museum this history has.
Go in the morning. Early light hits the Stearman’s nose, the temperature is survivable, and the departure pattern is busy — which gives you the shot that explains everything: a 1942 trainer in the foreground and a business jet rotating behind it, eighty years apart on the same asphalt.
Then read the ground. Drive the Airpark grid and pay attention to how the older streets and hangar rows sit at angles that answer to the original airfield rather than to Scottsdale’s tidy section lines. Airport Drive, the Butherus and Acoma industrial blocks, the alignment of the runway itself — this is a WWII base with a business park grown over it, and once you see the geometry you cannot unsee it.
Do not expect a base. There are no surviving barracks or hangars open to the public, no walking tour, no ranger. Everything except the runway and the memorial is gone or absorbed. If you want more, the airport occasionally hosts aviation events and the memorial’s nonprofit has historically run Stearman-related programming; check before you count on it.
Pair it with the rest of the Airpark’s lost history. CrackerJax — the fun park that held 28 acres of Scottsdale Road for thirty years — is a mile and a half south of the runway and closed in 2023, which makes the two of them a decent short tour of things this part of town used to be. For green space nearby, Horizon Park is minutes east and Thompson Peak Park is up in the north Scottsdale foothills. The wider story of the war years in Scottsdale is in the 1940s chapter.
Ninety days from alfalfa, twenty-eight months to gone
The Army’s problem in early 1942 was arithmetic. It needed tens of thousands of pilots and it had neither the instructors nor the airfields to make them, so it did two things at once: it contracted primary flight instruction out to civilian operators, and it went looking for flat, cheap, cloudless land. The Valley of the Sun answered both — roughly three hundred flying days a year and unlimited acreage nobody was using hard. Within months, training fields ringed Phoenix: Thunderbird I at Glendale, Luke, Williams, Falcon, and the alfalfa ground north of Scottsdale that became Thunderbird Field II.
The contractor was Southwest Airways, a company put together by Leland Hayward — a Hollywood talent agent with a serious flying habit — and John H. Connelly, operating under the supervision of Army Air Forces Training Command. Southwest ran three schools in the Valley. The Scottsdale field went from farmland to working airfield in about ninety days: runways graded, hangars up, barracks and mess halls and a control tower, all of it delivered at a speed that is the most convincing evidence anybody needs about what a wartime economy can do when it stops arguing.
It opened on June 22, 1942. Twenty-eight civilian flight instructors relocated to Scottsdale the following month. The airplane was the Stearman PT-17: open cockpit, two seats, radial engine, deliberately unforgiving in a way that surfaced a student’s limits fast. The primary course ran about ten weeks — roughly 65 hours of flying and 109 hours of ground school — and it existed to answer one question per cadet. Solo, or wash out.
The town felt it immediately. Scottsdale in 1942 was a farm community of about two thousand people, and the field was the largest thing to arrive since the cotton boom of the 1910s: jobs, boarders in spare rooms, dances, and a permanent drone overhead. The cadets were a mix the town had never hosted — Americans alongside British and Chinese trainees learning the same biplane. At the November 1943 peak, 615 cadets were on the field flying two hours a day each, which is on the order of 1,845 takeoffs and landings in a day. Over the school’s life its pilots logged something close to 26.5 million miles.
And then the pipeline filled. By 1944 the Army had more pilots in training than it needed, and the contract schools were the first thing cut. Thunderbird Field II was deactivated on October 16, 1944, twenty-eight months after it opened, with more than 5,500 graduates — about triple what the original expansion program had projected for it. Elsewhere in the Valley the war was still visibly present: at Papago Park, the POW camp that had held German prisoners since 1943 was two months from the Christmas Eve 1944 escape of twenty-five men through a 178-foot tunnel, the most famous prison break in Arizona history.
The field’s afterlife is the part that made modern Scottsdale. Arizona State Teachers College — now ASU — took the property for an aviation program and gave it up by June 1951, the distance and the cost being more than the program justified. In 1953 the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists bought it and opened Thunderbird Academy, keeping the name alive on a boarding school where cadets had once queued for flight line. Then, in 1966, the City of Scottsdale bought the airfield for $750,000. The first fixed-base operator was selected in April 1967; the first business jets landed that August.
What followed was not planned so much as unleashed. The runway attracted hangars, the hangars attracted businesses, and the Scottsdale Airpark metastasized into one of the largest employment concentrations in Greater Phoenix — a 2022 study credited airport-related activity with roughly $1 billion in regional economic impact and about 6,000 jobs. Every warehouse, showroom, medical office and steakhouse in that grid is downstream of an Army decision to grade a runway in a hurry in the spring of 1942.
What survives
The runway, mostly — an alignment in the dirt that has never stopped being used for the thing it was built for. The name survives too, scattered across the north Valley in streets, a school, a hotel and a memorial, long after most people stopped knowing what it referred to. And at the airport gate there is the Thunderbird Field II Veterans Memorial: a 1942 Stearman PT-17 above a granite monument and a pair of touchscreens, put there by people who understood that a business park is a strange kind of war memorial and decided to label it properly. Stand under the biplane on a January morning while a Gulfstream rotates off the same asphalt, and the arithmetic is right there. Ninety days to build, twenty-eight months of operation, 5,500 pilots, and eighty years of a city’s economy growing out of the leftovers.