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1946 — 1978
Two airlines the first year; the third in 1947: When Baer Field opened to civil use in 1946, two passenger airlines served it: TWA, which had come up the road from Smith Field, and Chicago & Southern Airlines. United Airlines appeared in 1947 with one DC-3 each way a day. Chicago & Southern merged into Delta Air Lines in 1953, and by that descent Delta became what the airport's history calls its longest-serving carrier, present in one form or another from 1953 to the present day. TWA ended its Fort Wayne flights in 1963. The propellers gave way in stages: United flew the turboprop Vickers Viscount into Baer Field for several years, and scheduled jet service began in January 1967 on United's Caravelles, soon joined by Delta's Douglas DC-9s. American Airlines arrived in 1974 — the year its Dallas/Fort Worth hub opened — flying Boeing 727s nonstop to it, the first of the airport's modern hub links. The regulation era's geography had one curiosity the airport's own history preserves: Baer Field was the largest airport in Indiana never served by a CAB-classified local-service airline — no Allegheny, no Ozark — and of the regulated era's "Big Four," Eastern Air Lines was the only one that never served Fort Wayne at all. Locally based Hub Airlines and other regionals filled in the 1960s and 1970s around the trunks.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne International Airport history record (airport authority, via the airport's published history) — the 1946 carriers, United's 1947 DC-3, the C&S–Delta merger of 1953 and Delta's longest-serving status, TWA's 1963 exit, the January 1967 Caravelle jets, American's 1974 arrival, the local-service and Big Four notes, Hub Airlines.