Mishawaka Airports: The fields that carried Mishawaka's name

The Airports · the fields that carried Mishawaka's name

Mishawaka's air record is the record of a name that kept leaving the city. The region's first flight, in 1911, was made from a field by Ironwood Drive and Dragoon Trail whose ground the South Bend record assigns to Mishawaka and the present address record disputes — the question is tested in the open below. The first field to carry the city's name, Mishawaka Airport, opened on Labor Day 1934 on Penn Township ground three and seven-tenths miles southeast of town, a commercial sod field that no city money built and no council minute reached here records; its successor, Sportsman's Airport on Day Road, was dedicated as the "new Mishawaka airport" in 1949 and was county-zoned township ground as well. The city's one continuous flying institution, the Mishawaka Pilots Club, founded in 1947, flew from three sites no source reached names and settled in 1957 on Mishawaka Road in Elkhart County, where its field operates today under a Mishawaka name on Elkhart ground. Inside the present city the whole federal record is two facilities: a private turf strip, Nelund Field, which the FAA record of November 2026 lists as closed indefinitely, and a hospital heliport at Edison Lakes, operational. No airline has ever served Mishawaka, no airmail route ever stopped here, no base was ever built here, and no municipal airport was ever proposed in any record reached — and each of those negatives is printed below at the size of the search that produced it, beside the positives the record does hold.