Lansing Municipal Airport propelled by history, opportunity

Once the setting of a commercial starring basketball legend Henry Ford, the Lansing Municipal Airport was established by automaker legend Henry Ford, whose name still is attached to a historic hangar he had built there.

Tucked between Lynwood and Munster, Indiana, Lansing officials see the facility as a reliever airport to Chicago Midway and other municipal airports, said Brian Hanigan, the village’s finance director and airport manager. He called the airport at the corner of Glenwood Lansing Road and Burnham Avenue “a hidden jewel” that’s historic and still has potential for expansion.

Ford purchased 1,400 acres for the airport in 1925. The majority of the parcel was in Illinois but it also extended into Indiana, said Lansing Mayor Patty Eidam, who researched the airport extensively when she was president of the Lansing Historical Society. What Ford liked about the land, she said, was its location between the Chicago Ford plant and the company’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan. It was an ideal spot to build a hangar to house Ford TriMotor aircraft the company had developed.

First, Ford had a landing field constructed, Eidam said, then in January 1926 work started on the Ford Hangar, which was erected within a year. As the hangar was built, Ford had a photograph taken every Tuesday throughout the construction. Eidam said it was impressive that someone in the 1920s had the foresight to document the process.

Ford ran the airport “very successfully” for a few years, Eidam said, and American Airlines used a portion of the Ford Hangar as a passenger terminal from 1928 through 1933 before moving its terminal to Midway Airport in Chicago. In those five years, Eidam said the hangar manager and his wife lived in a small apartment inside the hangar.

“This history is a lot of fun. It really, really is.,” she said. “It pretty much thrived. It looked like it was going to be extremely successful, and then Ford was one of the first industrialists that recognized the oncoming depression.”

After the Great Depression began in 1929, Ford began to shift his business focus and left the aviation business completely by 1933, Eidam said.

Ford leased the airport to Elmer Bowne, his airport manager at the time, who in 1937, leased the airport to Guy Amick, a Hammond business owner and aviator. Thomas Seay bought the airport from the Ford Company in 1948, Eidam said.

In 1976, the village of Lansing purchased the airport, named Chicago-Hammond Airport at the time, from Seay for $1.75 million, Eidam said. In 1977, the village received a check for $1.4 million from the state as reimbursement for the purchase, she said.

The Lansing Municipal Airport now stretches across 610 acres, about 150 acres smaller than Chicago Midway Airport. The airport has hangar space for 100 small aircraft, which are leased by owners of private airplanes, said Tom Gorski, the airport’s maintenance supervisor.

The property also contains a restaurant, a car rental company and a Fixed Base Operator building that provides aviation services such as fuel, parking and hangar space. The village has been talking to potential partners to take over operations of the FBO building, to provide maintenance and fuel, Hanigan said.

Annually, the village receives $150,000 in federal funding to be used for the airport, Hanigan said, which go toward taxiway and runway maintenance.

The original runway Ford had built stretches east-west and a second runway built in 2001 runs north-south.

Plans to extend the north-south runway, have been hampered by clearance issues on one side and a potential Illinois Department of Transportation project extending Joe Orr Road into Lansing on the other. Hanigan said the village is working with the Federal Aviation Administration on how to get around those obstacles.

Expanding the runway would cost an estimated $15 million, Hanigan said, the majority of which would come from federal and state funds. The village would be required to pay 5% of the costs, he said.

A longer north-south runway would allow the airport to accept more jet traffic, Hanigan said, which would allow more private planes to land in Lansing. The village is close to I-94 and I-80, which allows for easy access to Chicago and northwest Indiana, he said.

“We still have jets come here, but we can’t get them regularly because there’s concerns … because it takes a little longer runway to get a jet off,” Hanigan said. “Trying to attract jet traffic is going to require a longer runway.”

While the Ford Hangar is on the airport property, Hanigan said, it’s no longer an official part of the airport because it has been designated a historical landmark.

“It sounds strange calling it a hangar, but it’s really not part of the airport anymore,” Hanigan said. “That hangar now is really it’s own entity.”

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“It’s no longer used for aviation purposes,” Eidam added.

Over the years, the village board approved $100,000 of village funds to rehabilitate the roof of the Ford Hangar, Hanigan said. The Ford Hangar will require more rehabilitation work over the years, Hanigan said, and a temperature control system so the space can attract more events such as weddings.

As the village works toward securing funds to rehabilitate the building, events will still be held at the hangar, officials said.

The village has filed grant applications and has worked with federal partners such as U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth to see if federal funds could be allocated to rehabilitate the building, Hanigan said. Village officials are also hopeful to partner with the Ford Foundation to help rehabilitate the hangar, Eidam said.

The architecture of the Ford Hangar was innovative for its time, Hanigan said, with no middle support beams to hold up the roof, rails to open and close the hangar doors and windows wrapped around the whole building. The windows are divided into rectangles and then each rectangle has smaller rectangles inside.

To this day, Gorski gets phone calls from architecture schools to allow students to come see the Hangar and learn about it.

“It’s an architectural wonder, it really is,” Eidam said.