Qualla: Bader Field

Bader Field: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. On July 1, 1910, Glenn Curtiss took off from the Atlantic City beach near Million Dollar Pier in his Albany Flier biplane. He flew ten laps around a five-mile course over the open Atlantic Ocean - and in doing so became the first pilot ever to fly an airplane over the sea. He won a $5,000 prize and a footnote in aviation history. At the same meet, Walter Brookins, flying a Wright biplane, set a new altitude record of 6,175 feet by climbing above the Atlantic City beach. Atlantic City had decided to make itself the East Coast's answer to Kitty Hawk - a place where pilots and manufacturers could test new aircraft over a long beach with steady winds. Nine years later, the Aero Club of Atlantic City built a proper airfield on the bay side of Absecon Island. They called it the Atlantic City Municipal Airport. After Mayor Edward Bader died suddenly in 1927, the city renamed it Bader Field. It would operate for the next seventy-nine years.

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Image: Public domain

Bader Field: Charles Lindbergh's 90th Stop

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In October 1927, five months after his solo transatlantic flight to Paris, Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis at Bader Field. He was on the 90th of 92 stops on a national tour sponsored by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, a publicity camp...

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Image: Public domain

Bader Field: The Pride of Atlantic City

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In July 1933, two Black aviators - C. Alfred Chief Anderson and Dr. Albert E. Forsythe - took off from Bader Field in a Fairchild 24 they had named the Pride of Atlantic City. Their goal was to make the first round-trip transcontinental flight by Black pilots in the United States...

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Image: Public domain

Bader Field: Civil Air Patrol Coastal Patrol Base No. 1

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Weil, CC0. On February 28, 1942 - less than three months after Pearl Harbor and at the height of the German U-boat campaign along the Atlantic coast - the Civil Air Patrol activated Coastal Patrol Base No. 1 at Bader Field. It was the first of what would eventually be twenty-one CAP coastal...

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Image: Richard Weil | CC0

Bader Field: The Long Decline

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1958 the Navy converted the former NAS Atlantic City into the joint civilian-military Atlantic City International Airport, nine miles inland from Bader Field. Commercial airlines moved to the new facility by 1959. Bader Field lost its scheduled service for a decade until Alleg...

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Image: Public domain

Bader Field: What the Field Holds Now

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Bader Field officially closed in 2006 as an aviation facility. The control tower had already been removed in the late 1990s. The 143 acres of mostly flat land facing the Atlantic City casino skyline have been considered prime redevelopment real estate ever since. Bernie Robbins S...

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Image: Public domain