Friday / Weekend Open Line


Many people in the U.S. had not yet seen an airplane when the first municipal airport in the country opened this month in 1919 in Tucson, Arizona. The airfield was located where the rodeo grounds are today. A few years later, the airport moved to a larger parcel of land, part of which was given to the war department in 1940 to use as an aviation facility. A new civil airport was built in 1948, which still serves the Tucson area. Across the country, there are nearly 20,000 airports. Of these, more than 14,000 are private facilities and about 5,300 are publicly owned. These airfields serve the nearly quarter-million aircraft registered in the U.S. today. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the America’s Economy mobile application at <www.census.gov/mobile>.