The airport was established in 1928 as Fly Field, named for Colonel Ben Franklin Fly, whose advocacy for aviation in the region helped secure the federal backing that made the installation possible. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Yuma Aviation Bill on February 27, 1928, formalizing the federal commitment to what would become a significant aviation facility.

But the aviation history at Yuma predates even that founding. Robert Fowler stopped here in 1911 during the first transcontinental airplane flight across the United States, and his time at Yuma became a record: he was at the site before the formal airport existed, using whatever flat ground the desert provided. When Amelia Earhart visited in 1929, the airport was newly established, its surfaces still imperfect — which is why she nosed into the sand. Desert airfields in the late 1920s were exactly as rough as that image suggests.

The war transformed Fly Field into a major military installation. The Yuma Army Air Field processed thousands of pilots through training on AT-6 Texans and B-26 Marauders, taking advantage of the desert's exceptional flying weather — over 350 days of flyable conditions annually, reliable visibility, minimal precipitation, and the kind of undisturbed airspace that training operations require.

After the war, the Air Force took over and renamed the installation Vincent Air Force Base in 1956, honoring Brigadier General Casey Vincent of the China theater and the 'Terry and the Pirates' connection. The Marines arrived in 1959 and on July 20, 1962, the base was officially designated Marine Corps Air Station Yuma — the name it still carries today.

The civilian airport operates in joint use with the Marine Corps installation. Commercial flights land at Yuma International Airport (IATA: YUM, ICAO: KNYL) on the same runways used by F-35Bs and F/A-18 Hornets. The arrangement requires careful coordination, and civilian pilots transiting the area must be attentive to the active military airspace that surrounds the field.

Yuma's combination of heat, altitude, and consistent sunshine makes it one of the primary locations for Boeing's environmental flight testing program. The company tests both the 787 Dreamliner and the 777X at Yuma, subjecting the aircraft to conditions they will encounter in service at airlines operating in hot, arid parts of the world.

Testing widebody jets in a desert environment reveals performance characteristics — engine output at high temperatures, aerodynamic behavior in low-density air, systems performance under thermal stress — that cannot be replicated in the Pacific Northwest, where Boeing's major production facilities are located. Yuma provides a reliable proving ground, and the presence of the joint military infrastructure means the airfield can handle large aircraft that smaller civilian airports could not accommodate.

The 777X testing at Yuma placed the airport briefly in the aviation press — a reminder that the airport's role in American aviation extends beyond the commercial routes it serves and the Marine jets it hosts.

Yuma International Airport has been operating in some form for over a hundred years, counting from Robert Fowler's 1911 landing. In that century, it has served as a municipal airfield, a military training base, an Air Force installation, a Marine Corps air station, a commercial airport, and a corporate flight test facility — sometimes simultaneously.

The airport handles commercial traffic connecting Yuma to the regional hub cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, and others. The flights are short by commercial standards, but they connect a city of 100,000 people in the desert to the broader air travel network. Passengers boarding at Yuma step onto aircraft at a field where Amelia Earhart once got sand in her propeller, where Casey Vincent's name is on the runway, and where the Marine Corps is flying F-35Bs on the other side of the fence.