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1946 — 1991
Bought back for one dollar: The condition Fort Wayne's businessmen had attached in 1941 — that the government deed the base back to the community after the war — was honored in the cheapest possible coin. In 1946 the city bought the southwest field from the General Services Administration for one dollar and renamed it Fort Wayne Municipal Airport, though everyone went on calling the whole complex Baer Field, a habit the Air National Guard's return in 1951 fixed in place for good. The airlines moved down from Smith Field with the runways (the carrier record is the next entry), and in 1953 the airport opened its first purpose-built civil terminal, replacing a converted military structure: a permanent terminal with a control tower, an observation deck, and the "Look-Out Dining Room," a restaurant above the ramp where Fort Wayne ate while watching its airplanes. Late in the 1950s Hilton opened an on-airport hotel, the Hilton Inn, which outlived its brand twice — sold in the 1980s when Hilton moved downtown to the Grand Wayne Center, then reflagged Holiday Inn, Quality Inn, and Days Inn in turn before the building was finally bought by the airport itself in the 2000s to make room for parking. The 1953 terminal was modernized and expanded in 1981 with the airport's first jetways. In 1985 the city handed the field to a new landlord, the Fort Wayne–Allen County Airport Authority, a joint city-county body created that year, which has run both of Fort Wayne's airports ever since. The Army's oldest surviving building on the field, Hangar No. 40, stayed in use until weather damage in 2012; its last tenant was FedEx Express, and it was demolished in the spring of 2013.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne International Airport history record (airport authority, via the airport's published history) — the 1946 one-dollar purchase and renaming, the 1953 terminal and Look-Out Dining Room, the 1981 expansion, the 1985 authority transfer, Hangar No. 40.
- The News-Sentinel, "Government built airport for city" — the deed-back condition of the 1941 land deal and the 1949 formal turnover as the paper dates it.
- National Airmail Museum and authority materials — the on-airport hotel's succession of flags and its purchase for parking.