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1929–2014 · German Township, South Bend — boundary material, Granger share stated
The county's flagship airport began as a manufacturer's bet. In 1929 Vincent Bendix, of the Bendix Aviation Corporation, purchased 610 acres northwest of South Bend for a company airfield. Bendix Municipal Airport opened in 1933; the airport authority's own history page (flysbn.com) remembers the earliest operations logged on an outdoor chalkboard beside a dirt runway. The field then passed to public hands, and the sources give the transfer in two voices, printed whole: the Indiana Transportation History account, citing the South Bend Tribune, records that the county voted a $210,000 bond issue in July 1936 and bought the airport from Bendix in 1937; the St. Joseph County Airport Authority's audited financial report (Indiana State Board of Accounts report B27329, fiscal year 2005) states that the airport was owned and operated by St. Joseph County from 1938 until January 1, 1974. The purchase and the start of county operation are a year apart in the two tellings, and both are printed as their sources give them.
The name line, assembled from the authority's history page, its audited report, and the field's standard reference record, runs: Bendix Municipal Airport; then Bendix Field – St. Joseph County Airport; on January 1, 1974, Michiana Regional Airport; in 1993, Michiana Regional Transportation Center; then South Bend Regional Airport, on a renaming decision taken in 1999 and effective January 1, 2000; and on April 23, 2014, South Bend International Airport. The 2014 name is dug at full size in art-53-8 below.
The governing body is the St. Joseph County Airport Authority, a municipal corporation established January 1, 1974 by the St. Joseph County Council under Indiana Code 8-22-3, when the airport passed from direct county operation to the authority. Its four board members are appointed by the County Commissioners on a bipartisan basis. The authority's May 28, 2026 board agenda names President David R. Sage, Vice-President Andrew T. KosFelney, Treasurer Vincent C. Henderson, and Secretary Ashley Portolese-Miller; the executive director and CEO as of November 2026 is Mike Daigle, with a staff of about sixty, at 4477 Progress Drive, South Bend, IN 46628. (An older board list carried in the field's encyclopedia entry conflicts with the dated 2026 agenda; the agenda, as the authority's own current record, is the one printed here.)
Granger's share of the flagship is stated exactly: none of its ground, none of its governance — the field lies wholly in German Township, South Bend. Granger's share is the use of it, as the nearest commercial airport to the CDP, and the predecessor field it replaced stood on Granger's own ground (art-53-4).