Lloyd Stearman, Walter Beech, and Clyde Cessna founded the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita, Kansas in January 1925 — a deliberate choice by three specific people, not a geographic accident. Wichita has no coastline, no obvious natural advantage for building airplanes. By 1928, the city's 16 aircraft manufacturers were rolling 120 planes off the line every week, and one out of every four airplanes built in the United States came from Wichita — the year it earned the name it still carries: the Air Capital of the World.^[1]

A century later, the same names and the same convergence are still running. Textron Aviation — Cessna and Beechcraft, the same names as two of the 1925 founders — is still headquartered in Wichita. Spirit AeroSystems builds fuselages for Boeing there. Bombardier's Learjet calls Wichita home too. More than 450 companies now make up the city's aerospace manufacturing supply chain, employing more than 30,000 up-skilled workers.^[2]

The talent side of the convergence has its own real institution behind it. Wichita State University's National Institute for Aviation Research runs on a $400 million annual budget with a staff of 2,000 across 2 million square feet of lab and office space — one of the largest university-based aviation research operations anywhere. WSU Tech's National Center for Aviation Training, built alongside it, is described in the industry as the world's premier facility for developing a skilled aviation manufacturing workforce, training the people the 450 supply-chain companies actually need to hire.^[3]

A hundred years is long enough for almost anything to have drifted apart. Wichita's didn't. The place never had a natural reason to build airplanes; the capacity and the talent pipeline exist because three named men decided, in a single month in 1925, to build them there anyway — and a century of aerospace manufacturers and one of the country's largest aviation research institutes are still standing on that one decision.