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1945–2026 · county airfields whole
The flagship's second lives are cargo and maintenance. FedEx Express flies to Memphis, with FedEx Feeder (CSA Air) to Indianapolis; UPS upgauged to an Airbus A300 for holiday cargo from November 24, 2020 (the authority's Partner of the Year record); and SkyWest Airlines keeps a maintenance base at the field. Its annual public event is not an aerobatic air show but Aviation Education Day — free and public, most recently Saturday, August 23, 2025, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., and paused for 2026 because of scheduled construction (flysbn.com). A sweep of the 2025 Midwest air-show calendar record (MILAVIA) found no traditional air show at this field; that negative is printed at the strength of the sweep.
The show line runs the full span the record holds, from the exhibition era to that festival. Its first term is the county's first recorded airplane flight: René Simon, a French aviator touring with the Moisant International Aviators and holding French licence No. 177, flew his Blériot monoplane — shipped in by rail and assembled locally — on September 10, 1911, before a crowd reported at 30,000, at a field near the southeast corner of Ironwood and Dragoon Trail (The History Museum, South Bend). That 1911 exhibition is the dated first flight of the county record; whether any exhibition flight touched Harris Township ground is the question row #1 of this section leaves open as a named gap, and nothing here closes it. The middle term is the air parade and parachute jumps that opened Mishawaka Airport on Labor Day 1934, carried with the small fields below; the present term is Aviation Education Day above — a span of a hundred and fifteen years in which the county's air spectacle moved from a rented field and a rail-shipped monoplane to a customs-cleared international airport teaching its own public.
The accident record, swept through the NTSB's CAROL database and the aviation occurrence indexes for this field, holds two fatal accidents. On April 4, 2011 (CEN11FA267), a Cirrus SR22, N847C, was lost in a loss of control on final to runway 27L in a gusting crosswind, with one fatality. On March 17, 2013 (CEN13FA196), a Hawker Beechcraft 390 Premier IA, N26DK, suffered a dual engine shutdown and, after an aborted landing on runway 9R, collided with three residential structures: two people were killed (the pilot and a pilot-rated passenger) and three were seriously injured, two cabin passengers and one person on the ground. The non-fatal record includes a September 12, 2017 Beech N35 Bonanza fuel-exhaustion forced landing short of the perimeter fence (no injuries, aircraft a total loss), a May 25, 2018 halon-bottle explosion in the cargo bin of SkyWest/Delta Connection Flight 4647 after departure (emergency landing, no injuries), and a May 15, 2023 SkyWest mechanical failure with a return to the field (no injuries reported). For the avoidance of a known misattribution: the July 9, 1995 door loss on American Eagle Flight 4127 was a Chicago O'Hare departure incident, not this field.
The county's smaller fields complete the register. Mishawaka Pilots Club Airport (3C1, public use, Elkhart postal address) operates runways 3/21 at 2,243 feet and 12/30 at 3,140 feet. Chain-O-Lakes Airport (3IN7, private use, South Bend), activated November 1945, is a grass strip. Elkhart Municipal (EKM) is the neighbouring city's public field. Two private strips are listed under "Granger, IN" in the FAA-derived registries: C V Airport (II43, a 1,200-foot runway) and Foos Field (IN82, a 2,400-foot grass runway 18/36 at elevation 790 feet, 41.75278, −86.08829). Those are postal-Granger listings; registry data alone does not fix either strip against the CDP and township line, and they are printed at exactly that strength. The historic county fields close the pass: Mishawaka Airport, at Dragoon Trail and Elm Road, opened Labor Day 1934 with an air parade and parachute jumps (a January 1935 federal bulletin lists it commercial, 3,960 by 1,320 feet of sod; its last traced reference is hangar storm damage in May 1948); Sportsmen's Park on Day Road was dedicated in September 1949 as the "new Mishawaka airport," traced to an October 1, 1968 sale advertisement and a 1974 rezoning; and Gordon Airport appears in the Tribune of June 20, 1947 as a CAA-listed emergency landing field a quarter-mile south of Edison Road on the west side of Snowberry Road. The boundary question the row poses is answered in one line: the flagship stands in German Township and Granger's share is use, not ground — and the one proposal in the record that would move any part of it, the South Shore Line station relocation to the airport's west side on a new alignment (southshorelinesouthbendairportreroute.com), stands as a proposal only, as of November 2026.