Before Lindley Field, there was Maynard Field, dedicated west of Greensboro on December 6, 1919 and named for Lt. Belvin Maynard, a young North Carolina pilot famous for his transcontinental air-race exploits just after World War I. Maynard Field's two intersecting runways measured 1,890 and 1,249 feet. Its lighting system consisted of torches, lit at dusk by an early fixed-base operator to guide pilots home. By 1922 the Triad was getting crowded with grass strips - Miller Field in Winston-Salem, Charles Field's single barnstorming strip - and the cities began jockeying to host the region's main airport. Friendship, the rural community near Greensboro that won the prize in 1927, beat out Winston-Salem after Winston refused to pony up the construction funds.

Pitcairn Aviation won the contract for the second airmail route in the United States, New York to New Orleans, and pilot Sid Malloy made the first delivery in North Carolina on May 1, 1928, landing with two bags and lifting off with three more bound for Atlanta. Passenger service followed in 1930 - Dixie Flying Service, route to Washington - and Pitcairn morphed first into Eastern Air Transport and then into Eastern Air Lines, the carrier that would dominate Southern aviation for half a century. The Great Depression briefly shut the field. It reopened in May 1937 with two all-weather runways. Hangars went up. A weather bureau and a Commerce Department radio tower arrived. The torches were gone.

In 1993 Continental Lite tried to build a hub here. By 1995 it had bled the parent airline $140 million and Continental walked away. The lesson seemed clear: PTI was the wrong size for a passenger hub. Then in 1998 FedEx made the opposite bet. The cargo giant announced a mid-Atlantic hub at PTI - one of only five in the country - and demanded a new 9,000-foot parallel runway to fly it. The runway opened in 2010. The hub opened in 2003 and never left. Honda Aircraft Company picked PTI for its global headquarters in 2006. HAECO Americas grew into one of the world's largest independent aircraft maintenance providers. The airport had found its identity, and it wasn't connecting flights to Charlotte. It was building, fixing, and flying things.

Among the planes based at GSO until late 2025 was a piece of aviation history with a working purpose: the last DC-8 in regular service in the United States, operated by the disaster-relief organization Samaritan's Purse. The four-engine narrow-body, a design first flown in 1958, hauled supplies into earthquake zones and flooded provinces until its retirement in November 2025. The airport remains the home base for Samaritan's Purse's main maintenance facility, which still operates a Boeing 757 and a Boeing 767 for relief flights. When a hurricane drowns Honduras or a quake levels Turkish villages, the planes loaded with field hospitals and water filters often roll out of hangars here.

Boom Supersonic broke ground at PTI in late 2022 and completed its 65-acre Superfactory in June 2024. The company plans to build the Overture - a supersonic passenger airliner targeting Mach 1.7 over water - here, with commercial service projected for 2030. The factory will employ 1,750 people and the state's economists project a $32.8 billion impact over twenty years. JetZero followed in 2025 with an announcement of a $4.7 billion blended-wing-body manufacturing plant nearby, projected to create more than 14,500 jobs. A small Carolina airport that was once a grass strip lit by torches is now manufacturing the next aviation era - or trying to. The bet is enormous. So was Lindbergh's, when he set down here a century ago on a field with no runway at all.