It's time for Positively Kansas.

Coming up, a major milestone approaches in the history of the air capital of the world.

You'll see how Wichita's fate hinged upon a partnership that revolutionized air travel 100 years ago.

Also, we head to the country for a down home holiday celebration.

See why the Fulton Valley Farms country Christmas has such an impact on some people.

And in our Kansas Wild Edge report, see how the hunt for food keeps Kansas Marsh Hawks in the air almost around the clock.

Im Sierra Scott.

Join us for a half hour of information and inspiration right now on Positively Kansas.

Wichita may not have become the air capital of the world without the success of one airplane company called Travel Air.

We're coming up on the 100th anniversary of Travel Air and a major event that made Wichita the focus of aviators worldwide.

Chris Frank shows us how these historic events changed the course of Wichita's evolution.

If you were making a family tree of Wichita's aviation history, the lineage of three of Wichita's largest planemakers would go back to the Travel Air company.

Travel Air really represents what was best about Wichitas innovative spirit and what general aviation would become.

Beechcraft, Cessna Aircraft, and Stearman Aircraft-- which became Boeing's Wichita Division, and now Spirit Aerosystems-- can trace their lineage back to Travel Air.

So the significance is that that particular company came out of the Swallow company.

And then from there, we branched out with Cessna and Stearman.

And then, of course, Travel Air itself.

Travel Air wasn't Wichita's first company to manufacture airplanes for the general public.

That claim belongs to the E.M. Laird Airplane Company, later becoming Swallow Aircraft after Matty Laird's departure.

A quick side note here.

Clyde Cessna was building planes in the Jones car factory in North Wichita in 1916.

Cessna built those for his barnstorming exhibition business and for pilot training, but not to sell to the general public.

Although not the first, Travel Airs success is what solidified Wichita as the air capital of the world.

Travel Air, Inc., Lloyd Stearman, Walter Beech and Clyde Cessna.

And these three were powerhouses in aviation, during that time.

Travel Air first started building their airplanes on the East Bank of the Arkansas River on First Street, but they quickly outgrew that space.

They moved over here into the 500 block of West Douglas in the Delano neighborhood.

They built their planes right in these very buildings like where the 5thirty5 hair salon is and other businesses are.

Now, the owner of the 535 West Douglas Building had this mural painted honoring that Travel Air legacy and three important co-founders of the plane maker Cessna, Beech and Stearman.

So that first Travel Air was expensive.

Perhaps the foremost expert alive on Travel Air is aviation author and historian Ed Phillips.

Sitting in front of a Travel Air model D4000.

So in December of 24, they agreed, you know, that they would go into a business.

Phillips says in December 1924, Beech and Stearman flew to Cessnas Kingman County Farm, asking Cessna to join them in forming their own plane making company.

Phillips has authored nearly a dozen books on general aviation history and written more than a thousand articles on aerospace topics, he has a passion for preserving early aviation history and says Travel Air deserves to be celebrated.

So to me, it's the people they had people with ideas who were innovators, which really is what started it.

Two of those innovators were Lloyd Stearman and Walter Beech.

They were part of the Swallow company run by wealthy oilman Jake Moellendick.

Perhaps Moellendick doesn't get enough credit for envisioning Wichita as a potential hub for aircraft manufacturing.

He realized the value of aviation to get around.

So he was an oil man and he simply decided, You know what, we need it.

We can make this town.

That was one of the things he said to the paper is we can make this town an aviation hub.

So he was a visionary, in my opinion, and that's really where we get started with it.

Those early Swallow planes were constructed of wood like this Laird Swallow replica at the Kansas Aviation Museum.

A replica of the Laird Swallow is on display here at the Kansas Aviation Museum.

With the skin removed, you can see how the plane was put together with the wood railing.

That was the standard in the early 1920s.

But Stearman and Beech could see welded steel tubing was better than wood.

They wanted to be at the front of that manufacturing change.

But it's highly likely that that was the reason that traveler got started was basically wood versus steel.

Moellendick wouldnt switch from wood to steel tubing.

So Stearman and Beech wanted to leave Swallow and be a part of a new company willing to adopt new plane making ideas.

But they needed help and money.

So they flew Swallow aircraft to Kingman County to recruit Clyde Cessna.

Stearman and Beech went down to Clyde's farm and told them what they wanted to do and they needed his money.

Phillips says Cessna put up $25,000 to get Travel Air started.

Money that came from Cessnas successful wheat threshing business.

Walt Innes Jr. also made a sizable investment to get Travel Air started.

Innes Jr. was part of the Innes Department store family.

He was Travel Airs First President and treasurer.

Cessna later became president after Innes stepped down.

Lloyd Stearman was chief engineer, and Walter Beech, company secretary.

Beech had become good at demonstrating and selling planes and managing the factory floor.

Beech put his flying skills to work and winning flying competitions.

Winning purses from those competitions helped support Travel Air and promoted Travel Air planes.

Lloyd Stearman trained as an architect, designed the first Travel Air plane with steel tubing and wood wings.

So the first Travel Air flew in March of 1925.

The plane took flight from a section of land where later Wichita's first City Airport was built.

The area now occupied by McConnell Air Force Base.

That was the airplane that launched Travel Air.

And all those aviation pioneers.

Mary Lynn Oliver says her mother didn't talk a lot about company business with the two Beech daughters, but she says Olive Ann did occasionally reminisce about the Travel Air years and early struggling years at Beech.

Sometimes my mother would reminisce about the Travel Air days and you know about the racing days selling tickets to make the payroll for Beechcraft Travel Air.

And, you know, I think they were exciting times.

At a point Travel Air was delivering one fourth of all the general aviation planes sold in the U.S.

The world was coming to Wichita for airplanes.

What Travel Air to me is that is the the central focus of why Wichita became a major airframe manufacturing center.

That's what I push.

That one company, because it's an immense success.

It wasn't just successful.

It was immensely successful.

Numerous aircraft companies spawned in what was an aviation frenzy in Wichita at that time.

But Travel Air stood out over all of them.

Travel Air had so many orders, the company outgrew its Delano space.

Despite Travel Airs success, both Cessna and Stearman left on good terms to form their own companies and to put their names on their own airplane designs.

Cessna built his first factory in West Wichita at Second and Glenn Street.

Phillips, through his writings and interviews, works to counter what he says is a long standing myth regarding Cessna and Beech.

It is purported that Cessna and Beech contended over whether their planes should be biplanes with two wings or single wing to mono planes.

Phillips says there weren't any contentious issues on that.

True, Cessna was always a monoplane guy because Cessna recognized mono planes were more efficient and could fly faster than biplanes.

Walter Beech was never against monoplanes.

You always see Walter Beech was the biplane man and the biplane.

And no, Walter Beech was, one thing.

Would it sell?

Let's build it.

So Cessna was finding success in building his planes, and Lloyd Stearman first moved to Southern California to build his planes, but that didn't work out.

So he returned to Wichita and established Stearman Aircraft in southeast Wichita.

Stearman planes were selling well as U.S. mail transports and as military pilot trainers.

Boeing's parent company, United Aircraft and Transport, liked Stearman enough to purchase the company.

This is a Stearman aircraft built back in Wichita in 1931.

Now, have you ever considered that if Boeing's parent company hadn't taken an interest in buying the Stearman Aircraft Company, Boeing wouldn't have had a reason to be located right here in Wichita.

Wichita's history would have been so much different.

So after Cessna and Stearman left Travel Air, Walter Beech became president.

Olive Ann Miller, who later married Mr. Beech, was running the office.

Travel Air moved to a new factory at Central and Webb Road in East Wichita, which became the Beechcraft plant in the 1930s.

Travel Air planes were so well respected that Charles Lindbergh asked Beech to build him a plane for Lindbergh's Cross Atlantic flight.

Phillips says Beech considered it, but decided against building Lindbergh's plane because it would mean delaying customer orders.

And their customers everything.

So he wasn't going to cancel anybody's airplane for six months to do that.

So Lindbergh instead turned to Ryan Airlines of San Diego to build his plane to cross the Atlantic.

Lindbergh's successful flight only added fuel to the aviation frenzy.

Orders poured in to planemakers, including Travel Air.

Travel Air was so successful it was attracting attention from companies wanting to purchase it.

Eventually, the board sold Travel Air to the Curtiss Wright Company.

Walter Beech was part of the deal.

He left Wichita to join Curtiss Wright as vice president.

A few years later, the Beeches got tired of that life and decided to return to Wichita to start their own company.

That's when Beech Aircraft was founded in 1932.

In the depths of the economic Great Depression.

So for several decades, Beech, Cessna and Boeing were the anchors of Wichita's aviation economy.

All with their Travel Air connections.

If you took Travel Air, if it never existed, we wouldn't be sitting here.

I don't think so, because there was so much built on the success of that.

And you have a company like Curtiss Wright that recognized that.

It's this aviation history of Wichita that gets forgotten as time marches on.

Well, I think it's true that without Travel Air and without the beginning of early aviation and all those aviation pioneers that worked together and then went their own separate ways because they had their own ideas about where the wings should be and where, you know, how they should be high or low or whatever built their own designs.

We have to be reminded or we forget that heritage that goes back a century ago when a few local aviators wanted to switch from wood to steel tubing to build airplanes.

Wichita had numerous aviation companies in the city's early aviation history.

But it is one single company Travel Air, which had the nucleus of leaders who made Wichita the air capital of the world.

So Wichita ought to embrace that culture, embrace that heritage, celebrate that, because this is a city that has thrived and benefited richly by the formation of Travel Air by three individuals just over under 100 years ago.

Sauceda says some local civic groups are discussing ways to recognize and celebrate two important 100 year anniversaries coming up.

Besides Travel Air, the 100th anniversary of Wichitas hosting of the National Air Congress comes in October 2024.

The Wichita Chapter National Aeronautic Association hosted the National Air Congress October 10th and 11th in 1924.

An estimated 35,000 spectators attended the two day air show and air races at the location where the Kansas Air Museum and McConnell Air Force Base are now.

There's a concerted effort to work together to find a way to make sure the celebration happens relating to both these major milestones in Wichita aviation.

Wichita leaders then were lobbying to get Wichita as a stop along the cross-country airmail route.

But having a municipal airport was needed.

Hosting the National Air Congress was one way of raising local awareness and money towards getting an airport.

So Wichita has two important 100 year anniversaries relating to the city's aviation history.

And I think people in Wichita should know that history maybe more than they do.

Absolutely.

We need to find a way to celebrate that and highlight that.

He's confident it will happen.

It is Wichita's legacy that if not recognized, remembered and passed on will remain forgotten by all but a few.

This is Chris Frank for Positively Kansas.

We'll be watching to see how these important 100 year anniversaries are recognized and follow up in coming months.

Tiny Towanda, Kansas is big on Christmas spirit and a big reason for that is Fulton Valley Farms.

It's a breathtaking, sprawling piece of property that every year hosts A Country Christmas.

Anthony Powell shows us that for some folks, Country Christmas becomes a very personal event.

As soon as you enter Fulton Valley Farms, the spirit of Christmas surrounds you.

Go a bit further in and you're amazed by the festive sights and sounds of the farms month long “A Country Christmas ” event.

What you're seeing is Betty's dream come true.

I'm a Christmas baby and I've always loved Christmas and I wanted to do Christmas.

And I thought that we needed oftentimes to be reminded why we do Christmas.

2023 marks the 10th anniversary of A Country Christmas.

There is truly something for everybody.

A million to a million two lights in the woods on those wooded paths.

We have Santa on site.

We have the Grinch on site.

We have a lot of fun is what we have.

Many folks have made Fulton Valley Farms a Christmas tradition.

In 2017, Abiline, Kansas resident Melissa Sanchez brought her grandfather, Linus, here because he wanted to see live reindeer.

Because he just loved it out here.

And he was such a positive person.

And it just he lit up when he seen everything.

Linus passed away in 2018, but because he had such a wonderful experience, every year since, Melissa has honored him by bringing somebody close to her to A Country Christmas.

Every year.

They-- Betty and her husband, they just go out of their way to just think of new ideas to make it better and better.

Meanwhile, for this group of best friends, 2023 was their first time at the farm.

Every year they get together to have a nice meal, talk and celebrate the holidays.

Well, we were looking for somewhere unique and different.

And so Fulton came up on our list.

So we kind of looked at it throughout and were like, Oh my gosh, this looks like a home away from home.

While, of course, there's no more special time than Christmas at the farm, visitors flock here all times of year.

They learn about the history.

The farm has been in owner David Corbins family for over 150 years and is one of the oldest family farms in Kansas.

We showcase what Kansas farmers look like, what they do and how they do it.

Folks come from all over the world to Fulton Valley Farms.

Betty says she often hears this from faraway visitors.

About the place.

You know what they tell me?

I like the corn growing in the field.

I like the soybeans because they don't see that.

They don't get up close and personal with crops.

The farm also hosts weddings, corporate events, large family picnics.

Betty will never forget a parent being concerned about what his kids would do at a farm event.

They'll pick up a stick.

They'll run.

They'll roll around in the grass.

And.

But the number one thing is they're not doing this.

You know, and that's what this is about.

Get outside, get do something.

And in the process, create lots of priceless memories.

And, of course, there's nothing more special than Christmas memories, which is why Fulton Valley Farms has become a home away from home during the holidays.

They just go so far out of their way for their customers, and it's such a blessing.

It is beautiful.

I walked up and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm in a whole brand new little place.

Like something you'd see on those Christmas novel movies.

With those kind of sentiments.

It's no wonder why owners Betty and David Corbin often say: You find something you love, its not work.

At Fulton Valley Farms in Towanda.

I'm Anthony Powell for Positively Kansas.

Owners Betty and David Corbin say friends, family and volunteers are a huge help in setting up the farm for Christmas and other events.

As you can imagine, the Corbin still work around the clock, but as they happily say, there's nowhere else they'd rather be than on the farm.

Now to this week's Kansas Wild Edge report, Photojournalist Mike Blair ventured out to find some hardy and hungry hunters who stalk their prey from the sky.

Drive by a flat, marshy grassland.

And chances are you'll see a Northern Harrier.

That's what's on their birth certificate.

Though their name tag more likely, says Marsh Hawk.

These buoyant, slender raptors float just above the grass line, wheeling and turning as they search for prey.

Dark in color, they're instantly recognized by a broad white band in front of the tail.

They're marathoners among birds of prey, sometimes covering more than a hundred miles a day, while circling a small hunting zone.

Other raptors spend much time sitting and watching, attacking only when prey is seen.

But Harriers, like owls, use sound to help pinpoint prey at close range.

Thus they fly almost continually, low and slow.

Watching and listening.

Main menu items are small mammals, mice, rats and voles.

But frogs are high on the list, as are birds like redwing blackbirds.

Even small ducks, especially the weak and sick, are taken.

Healthy ducks respect marsh hawks and usually sprint out of harm's way when they approach.

Because they hunt just a few feet high, marsh hawks often gain the element of surprise in tall vegetation.

They can wheel and drop instantly to seize their prey.

They often miss their strikes resuming flight immediately.

When successful, they eat on the ground.

Marsh Hawks readily scavenge when food is scarce.

Female marsh hawks are dark brown and streaked, camouflaged to help hide in grassy ground nests.

Males are handsome, pale gray with black wingtips.

Especially in winter, marsh hawks are common, where water and cattails give way to grasslands.

They are not found in forest or heavily wooded situations.

But in the open, riding the rails of an unseen roller coaster, they make for easy and exciting bird observations.

I'm Mike Blair for Positively Kansas.

Well, that's a wrap for this week.

Im Sierra Scott.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you again soon.