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Four Strips, and the Landing That Was South Bend's
The town's fields in FAA form: four strips, not three
AUDIT ROW #267 · FAA-RECORD COMPILATIONS, THIS PASS · DELTA CANDIDATE BANKED
The banked text counts three grass strips; the FAA-record record carries four, and this section prints the four. Working from the federal record as compiled from FAA data: Dreessen Field (17II), turf, 2,600 feet, elevation 706 feet, at 41°27.0027′N, 086°30.6175′W; May's Strip (87IN), turf, 1,320 feet, elevation 715 feet; Stuntz & Hochstetler Pines Airport (59IN), 2,005 feet; and Drake Field (II99), which stands in the FAA-record compilations of Indiana airports alongside the other three. Four strips, all private-use grass fields of the kind small towns actually hold, is the form the record supports. The conflict with Transportation — which counts three in one sentence and then itself adds Drake Field at single-compilation strength in the next — is banked here as a delta candidate for assembly, not folded: the four-strip form is this section's, printed on the compilations' strength, and GAP-W-TRN-6's settler for the fields' full particulars remains the FAA Form 5010 records themselves, which this seat did not pull. The item's exhibition limb — a first county exhibition flight date and a first flight date for this ground — does not stand in the records reached; the Independent's and Tribune's early-aviation files are its named settler, and the limb is carried open at that strength rather than borrowed from the county's better-documented fields.
Contract airmail at this ground: the route ran north of here
AUDIT ROW #268 · CONTRACT AIR MAIL ROUTE RECORD, TESTED
Contract airmail's northern-Indiana course ran through the South Bend corridor, and no Walkerton stop, field approval, or route-survey mention of this ground stands in the route record as reached. The transcontinental contract airway crossed this county on its northern line — its beacon fields and its Bendix Field station are the county's documented airmail geography, seated in South Bend in the county's own record, while Walkerton's four strips are all later, private, and grass. The item closes at the size that finding supports: the airmail era passed over this ground without landing on it, printed as a test result at route-record strength, with Post Office Department route-survey records named as the settler for anything below it.
The war years, and the base that went elsewhere
AUDIT ROW #269 · MILITARY USE, TESTED AS A NEGATIVE
No military or training use of Walkerton's strips in either world war stands in the record reached. The fields are private strips; the county's military aviation of record seated at Bendix Field, whose wartime course is South Bend's history and is pointed to at boundary size only, not retold. For this ground the war-years item is a tested negative in both its limbs — no training field on Walkerton soil, and no home field taken to war — printed whole at the strength of the military-airfield record searched.
The famous landing, tested: Earhart in this county, November 1936
AUDIT ROW #270 · THE TIGHAR RESEARCH CHRONOLOGY, READ THIS PASS
Amelia Earhart did land in St. Joseph County in 1936 — at Bendix Field, in South Bend, on business; no Walkerton-ground landing stands in the record, and the test is printed at its true size. TIGHAR's research chronology of the Earhart Project places her Lockheed Electra in California from September 24 to November 23, 1936, and then has her fly back east, stopping in South Bend to talk to Vince Bendix — the landing the school histories of the county remember ("In 1936 she landed her Lockheed Electra at Bendix Field in South Bend") was that stop: a manufacturer call on Vincent Bendix, whose name the field itself carried, not a race stop and not a fuel halt on Walkerton grass. Walkerton's four strips lay some fifteen miles southwest, and no chronology, memoir, or press account reached puts Earhart on any of them. The famous-landing item therefore closes with the county's real event printed at boundary size where it belongs — South Bend's — and the Walkerton test stated plainly at chronology strength: she never landed here, so far as the record that documents her movements can show, and that record is a strong one.