History
Kirtland Air Force Base was named for Colonel Roy C. Kirtland (1874–1941) in February 1942. Colonel Kirtland learned to fly in 1911 in one of the first Wright airplanes at Dayton, Ohio. During World War I he organized and commanded a regiment of mechanics, and served as an inspector of aviation facilities. Recalled from retirement in 1941 at the age of 65, the oldest military pilot in the Air Corps, he died of a heart attack on 2 May 1941 at Moffett Field, California.
Kirtland Air Force Base has changed a great deal since its establishment as a U.S. Army airfield in 1941. It has evolved from a hastily constructed training and testing facility necessitated by the onset of World War II to a significant USAF center for R&D. What began as a 2,000-acre air base has grown into a 51,800-plus-acre facility.
Read more about this topic: Kirtland Air Force Base
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)