Departure
92%
vs 95% ▼ 3
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Ainsworth Regional Airport is a quiet public-use general aviation field seven miles northwest of Ainsworth, Nebraska, built during the Second World War as an Army Air Forces training base and now operated by the Ainsworth Airport Authority. It offers two hard-surfaced, lit runways and straightforward VFR access across open Sandhills farmland, making it a useful stop for cross-country pilots in this part of north-central Nebraska.
Ainsworth Regional Airport (KANW) serves the town of Ainsworth in Brown County, Nebraska, from a site about seven miles northwest of the town. It is a small, uncontrolled general aviation airport owned and run by the Ainsworth Airport Authority, with a modest level of based traffic and light annual movements. For a simulator pilot, its interest lies chiefly in its long wartime history as a bomber and fighter training field and in the unusually generous runway lengths it retains from that era relative to its current quiet civilian use.
The airport sits in open farm and pasture country in Brown County, Nebraska, seven miles northwest of the town of Ainsworth. It is an uncontrolled field with no operating control tower, and approach and departure control services in the surrounding airspace are provided by Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center. The field is bordered historically by farmland to the west and north, Sand Draw to the east, and US Highway 20 to the south.
Ainsworth Regional has two physical hard-surfaced runways, both lit. Runway 17/35 is the longer of the pair, with published lengths of 6,801 feet for runway 17 and 7,026 feet for runway 35. Runway 13/31 is 5,460 feet in length in both directions. There is no ILS at the field.
Pilots should monitor the CTAF/UNICOM frequency of 122.8 MHz for traffic advisories, as the airport has no control tower. An automated weather observing system (AWOS-3) is available on 118.325 MHz. Denver Center can be reached on 132.7 MHz, with an additional remote communications outlet frequency of 122.4 MHz associated with Columbus radio. Approach and departure control in the vicinity is provided by Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center.
As an uncontrolled airport, traffic should be coordinated by self-announcing on the CTAF/UNICOM frequency of 122.8 MHz. No published circuit height, noise abatement procedure, or other local joining restriction is available for this field.
The airfield lies within open Sandhills farmland northwest of Ainsworth. Historically the site has been bounded by farmland to the west and north, Sand Draw to the east, and US Highway 20 to the south, all of which remain useful visual references when approaching the field from the surrounding countryside.
Ainsworth Regional Airport began life as Ainsworth Army Airfield, built by the United States Army Air Forces between August and November 1942 on a 2,403-acre site acquired from seven local landowners. Sixty-four buildings were erected, and a rail spur was laid to the existing Chicago Northwestern line to bring in construction materials, food, and coal; at its peak the base housed over 600 officers and enlisted men. The field originally had three 7,300 by 150-foot concrete runways, a hangar, warehouse, repair and machine shops, link and bomb trainers, and Norden bombsight vaults. Activated on 30 November 1942 as one of eleven Army Air Forces training bases in Nebraska, it operated under the 353d Army Air Force Base Unit of the Second Air Force and served as a satellite field of Rapid City Army Air Base, South Dakota. Its primary role was training air crews of the 540th and 543rd Bombardment Squadrons of the 383d Bombardment Group on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses before deployment to Europe, with bomber crews practising runs over the wildlife refuge in neighbouring Cherry County. The 364th Fighter Squadron trained with Bell P-39 Airacobras at Ainsworth in late 1943, and the 53d Fighter Squadron trained with Republic P-47 Thunderbolts there between November 1943 and March 1944; aircraft camouflage experiments were also conducted at the field. The base closed on 31 December 1945, after which the US Army Corps of Engineers issued the City of Ainsworth a licence for commercial aircraft operations in 1946, and the airfield was declared surplus and transferred to the city in 1948 for use as a municipal airport. By late 1948 it supported charter flights, aircraft rental, flight lessons, and a maintenance shop, and for a year or two from 1959 it even saw scheduled Frontier Airlines DC-3 service. In the mid-1980s the National Scientific Balloon Facility used the airport for periodic balloon missions, a practice discontinued by the late 1980s amid a depressed local economy. A handful of wartime-era buildings survive today, including one hangar still in use, a supply warehouse, the bombardier training building, and the bombsight building, alongside taxiways, hardstands, and roads in various states of repair.
The airport is overseen by the Ainsworth Airport Authority, which provides basic services through an airport manager responsible for fuel sales, hangar rental, tie-downs, weather station operation, and flight plan support. Around 1,300 acres of the airport's land is leased out to area farmers for crops and pasture. In the year ending 25 June 2020 the field recorded about 4,000 aircraft operations and had 13 based aircraft. Self-service fuel has been reported as available around the clock via a credit-card system.
