Aviation came to Eagle Farm almost by accident. A patch of ground near the racecourse was first used as a landing field in 1922, and the aerodrome opened officially in 1925. Qantas flew scheduled services from here by 1926 and established the Brisbane Flying Training School in 1927, when flight itself was still a novelty most Australians had never witnessed. This was the era of the great long-distance attempts, and Eagle Farm sat at the centre of them. Kingsford Smith departed again in October 1934, this time from the newer Archerfield aerodrome, flying the Lady Southern Cross with Gordon Taylor to attempt the first eastward crossing of the Pacific, from Australia to the United States. By 1931, though, civil flying had shifted to the new Archerfield aerodrome, and Eagle Farm fell quiet, its hangars carted away. The pause would not last.

When the Pacific War erupted in December 1941, the Allies discovered they were flying half-blind. They knew almost nothing about the Japanese aircraft outclassing them in the skies over New Guinea. The answer took shape inside Hangar 7 at Eagle Farm, where the Allied Technical Air Intelligence Unit gathered the wreckage of crashed enemy planes and, piece by piece, rebuilt them to fly. From the remains of five smashed aircraft recovered near Buna, engineers assembled a single airworthy Zero. On 20 July 1943, Captain William Farrior lifted that rebuilt fighter off the Eagle Farm runway and flew it for thirty minutes over Brisbane. In mock dogfights that August, the Zero out-turned a Spitfire below twenty thousand feet, a sobering lesson learned from an aircraft that should never have flown again.

The unit at Eagle Farm did something else that outlived the war: it gave the enemy's aircraft names. Allied pilots needed a quick, memorable way to call out aircraft types in the chaos of combat, so a small team led by Captain Frank McCoy and Sergeant Francis Williams invented a code. Fighters got men's names, bombers got women's names, and the men reached for whatever names were close to hand. A bomber was christened Louise after McCoy's wife, another June after his daughter. An interceptor was named George, after the unit's own RAAF illustrator, Flight Sergeant George Rimmington, who drew the recognition silhouettes. This homespun scheme, dreamed up in a Brisbane hangar, became the standard Allied code for Japanese aircraft across the entire Pacific theatre.

After the war Eagle Farm returned to civilian life, and Ansett and Trans Australia Airlines moved in during 1947, working out of surplus military sheds nicknamed igloos. For four decades it was simply Brisbane's airport: more than two million passengers passed through in 1977 alone. But the city had outgrown it. Long-haul flights to Asia had to stop and refuel elsewhere, putting Brisbane at a disadvantage, and so a larger airport was built just to the north. When the new Brisbane Airport opened in 1988, the final flight left the old field on 20 March, and Eagle Farm closed for good. Much of it disappeared under the Gateway Motorway. Yet a trace survives: the northeastern end of the old main runway lives on as a taxiway at the airport that replaced it, a faint line of asphalt remembering where Australian aviation learned to fly.