WICHITA, Kan. — When American Eagle Flight 5342 took off from Wichita, the Midwest city with a proud aviation history was glowing from a big moment.
It had just hosted the next generation of Olympic hopefuls at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the kind of major sporting event that leaders of the largest city in Kansas had envisioned when they opened a 15,000-seat arena in 2010. For Wichita, which once built many of the nation’s aircraft, the skating showcase was another way of putting the community in America’s heartland on a larger stage.
Then came the horror of learning the flight never made it.
“We were so proud to see these high-level athletes, their families, their friends, fans, coming to our community and sharing their skills and talents so that the whole world could see,” Mayor Lily Wu said. “To end it with this type of tragedy just truly breaks my heart.”
The midair collision Wednesday night between the plane and an Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., has left Wichita grieving. The worst U.S. air disaster in a generation killed 67 people, including young figure skaters who had attended a national development camp in Wichita following the championships. No one survived.
The city of nearly 400,000 residents has deep connections to America’s aviation history and is a regional hub for oil companies, engineers and drillers, riding the industry’s boom-and-bust cycles.
It was unclear how many of the victims may have been Wichita residents. Authorities have not released a list of the passengers, who included hunting buddies, an attorney on a business trip and a college student returning from her grandfather’s funeral.
Following the collision, city and religious leaders held a prayer vigil that turned out hundreds of people who prayed for victims’ families and pledged to provide comfort.
“This unity cannot just stay in sadness. It has to elicit something greater, something brighter, something that can shine forth,” said Rabbi Shmulik Greenberg of Chabad, a Hasidic synagogue and community center in Wichita.
An aircraft hub in the Midwest
Wichita started as a trading post after the American Civil War, had a short life as a cattle drive town and boomed in the 1940s and 1950s, with military and civilian aircraft production.
Passengers moving through security at Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, named for the president who grew up in Abilene, first walk past a display describing Wichita as the “Air Capital of the World.”
The industry has a history of more than a century in the area, with storied founders such as Clyde Cessna and Walter and Olive Ann Beech, who gave their names to aircraft companies. During World War II, Boeing made more than 1,700 bombers in Wichita, said Logan Daugherty, curator of the Kansas Aviation Museum.
The industry employs tens of thousands of area residents, who work for major manufactures such as Spirit AeroSystems, as well as a network of more than 350 suppliers, according to an economic development agency called the Greater Wichita Partnership.
The community has had its share of other strivers: The first White Castle restaurant opened here in 1921, beginning one of the first fast-food hamburger chains. Two Wichita State University students opened the first Pizza Hut in 1958. Koch Industries — the energy, agriculture and manufacturing conglomerate with 121,000-plus employees — has its leafy headquarters grounds in the north part of the city.
The city recently celebrated the first anniversary of the start of the single daily commercial American Airlines flight from Wichita to Washington.
The manufacturer of the passenger airline that went down, Bombardier, has its U.S. headquarters in Wichita. Jim Howell, who serves on the local county commission, said the plane had been certified in the city.
“There’s a lot of connections to this plane. There’s a lot of connections to Bombardier as a company,” said Howell, who spent two decades working in flight testing, including a stint with Bombardier in the early 1990s. “We have a lot of employees who work for Bombardier who are still involved in testing and maintaining those types of planes here in Wichita.”
