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In 1936, with a $300,000 bond issue, the City of Portland purchased 700 acres of land along the Columbia River. This, too, was marshy riverside land that needed 4 million cubic yards of dredged landfill to be usable. A $1.3 million grant from the Works Progress Administration, a part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, helped pay for construction costs. The Portland-Columbia Airport was completed in 1940, with its opening ceremony on October 13.
A new terminal was located off Marine Drive, with the runways forming an X toward the western side of the airport. Its location identifier, PDX, was adopted after World War II by adding X to the existing National Weather Service identifier, much like Los Angeles and Phoenix. The Port of Portland constructed a new terminal in 1959 between two parallel runways that had been newly con- structed. That runway configuration remains in use, and terminal expansions and upgrades followed in 1977, 1986, 1992, and 1994.
Eight years after the new airport’s opening, Flightcraft began operations. The Beechcraft Bonanza happened to be introduced the year prior, and Flightcraft was her- alded as one of the early stars in the Beechcraft dealer constellation. There were as many as six Flightcraft loca- tions at one point.
We can credit the development of the electric scoop- type aircraft tug to Si King, one of Flightcraft’s founders. In 1945, Wilt Paulson founded the Willamette Aircraft and Engine Company in Beaverton, Oregon, to repurpose military aircraft for crop dusting and other civilian uses. After a move to Warrenton, Oregon, in 1948, Paulson’s busi- ness morphed into the electric vehicle company known as LEKTRO. LEKTRO developed products for the logging,
farming, golf and aviation industries. In 1967, Paulson and Si King got together to solve the problem caused by tow bars of the day, which often damaged aircraft nose gear
when towing. Si King envisioned a system in which the nose gear could be lifted with a scoop to cradle the gear, eliminating the towbar. They created the Airporter electric towbar-less tug. Thousands were built and sold around the world, and the concept is still in wide- spread use today.
It was the Beech 18’s height of popularity, and the Flightcraft team sold and serviced the amazing twin from its Portland facility. They oper- ated Flightcraft out of PDX until the early 1970s when Beech Holdings bought the company to maintain its service center. Less than a year later, in 1973, Vin Manilla and David Hinson bought Flightcraft from Beech Holdings, and Hinson stayed on until 1978, when he left to start Midway Airlines. Hinson eventually was appointed to head the FAA under President Clinton.
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