Midland Army Air Field Museum

The airport between Midland and Odessa began as Sloan Field, a grass strip Samuel Addison Sloan started in 1927 on land leased from rancher Clarence Scharbauer. His brother Harvey sold it to the city in 1939 for $14,500. Midland businessmen lobbied Washington for a training base as war approached, the WPA improved the runways, and in June 1941 the Army chose the field. The first cadets arrived from Ellington Field on February 6, 1942, and that September it was named Midland Army Air Field.

It was the Army Air Forces Bombardier School, one of four schools of the West Texas Bombardier Quadrangle with Big Spring, San Angelo and Childress, and its whole purpose was teaching young men the Norden bombsight. The base population passed 4,000, and by the end of training on January 1, 1946 it had graduated 6,627 bombardier officers.

The museum tells that story inside a hangar, with flight simulators and a training room, exhibits on the home front, George H. W. Bush's missions in the Pacific and the photographs of journalist Harvey Herd. Its aircraft include a Beech C-45, a Fairchild PT-19, a Ryan Navion, a T-28 Trojan and a Japanese aircraft replica built for the film Tora! Tora! Tora! Volunteers of the Commemorative Air Force's High Sky Wing keep it running. The CAF had its headquarters and national museum here from 1991 until it moved to Dallas in 2015.