Bendix Field: the purchase of 1929 and the opening of 1933

1929 — 1933

The airport began as a manufacturer's land purchase: In 1929 Vincent Bendix, founder of the Bendix Aviation Corporation, purchased 610 acres northwest of South Bend to give the city air service closer in than the northeast field. Bendix Municipal Airport opened on the ground in 1933. The airport authority's history keeps the founding detail that measures the distance traveled: "When the airport first opened, flights were logged on a chalkboard posted outdoors, near a dirt runway." Against that, the Tribune's 1973 retrospective set the scene at Bendix Field in the years the old airport still carried the traffic — "a horseshoe shaped driveway to a grass runway and little else." The first operator of record was there from the start: Homer Stockert established Stockert Flying Service at Bendix Field in 1933, the beginning of a tenure that made him the field's defining pilot — he left during the Second World War to test-fly P-47 Thunderbolts at Evansville, returned after the war and expanded the service with his wife Dora, and died in 1971. His career and the field's early decades are the subject of Quentin L. Hartwig's Bendix Field: The History of an Airport and Legendary Pilot Homer Stockert (2014). Vincent Bendix's own company is treated in the Businesses section; what belongs here is the ground he bought and the field that took his name.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Airport Authority, "History" (flysbn.com) — the 1929 purchase of 610 acres by Vincent Bendix and the chalkboard flight log at the dirt runway.
2. South Bend Tribune, "A Look Back: Vincent Bendix was the man behind the start of airport in South Bend," 21 May 2018 — Bendix Municipal Airport opened in 1933; and the Tribune of 1 April 1973 for the horseshoe driveway and grass runway.
3. Quentin L. Hartwig, Bendix Field: The History of an Airport and Legendary Pilot Homer Stockert (2014) — Stockert Flying Service established at Bendix Field in 1933, the Evansville test-flying, the postwar expansion with Dora Stockert, and Stockert's death in 1971.