Departure
98%
vs 95% ▲ 3
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Freeman Municipal Airport (KSER) is a city-owned general aviation field two nautical miles southwest of Seymour, Indiana, built in 1942 as Freeman Army Airfield and now home to a small museum commemorating its wartime past. It offers two long asphalt runways, FBO services and fuel, and remains an active base for training, agricultural and survey operations.
Freeman Municipal Airport serves Seymour, Indiana, as a public-use general aviation facility owned by the city and operated under the Seymour Airport Authority. It traces its origins to Freeman Army Airfield, a major Second World War twin-engine and helicopter training base, and today supports a mix of general aviation, agricultural, survey and National Guard activity. For a simulator pilot the field is notable both for its generous runway lengths, a legacy of its military past, and for its rich wartime history, including links to the Tuskegee Airmen and the Freeman Field mutiny.
The airport lies about two nautical miles southwest of the central business district of Seymour, a city in Jackson County, Indiana. It sits on roughly 2,100 acres of land, much of which is leased out for agriculture, giving the surrounding approach paths an open, rural character typical of a Midwestern general aviation field.
Freeman Municipal has two paved, lit runways. Runway 05/23 is the longer of the pair at 6,968 feet, while runway 14/32 measures 5,328 feet. Both are hard-surfaced and equipped with runway lighting, and the field has no ILS.
Formal radio frequency data was not available in the sources consulted, but the airport is reported to provide radio control of aircraft operations on and in the vicinity of the field daily from April through October. Instrument approach procedures are published for the airport by the FAA, allowing non-precision arrivals despite the absence of an ILS.
No specific circuit height or noise abatement procedures are published by the airport manager, and pilots should expect a straightforward general aviation traffic pattern typical of a non-towered field, bearing in mind the seasonal radio-controlled operations described above.
The airport sits about two miles southwest of Seymour's town centre on a large tract of mostly agricultural land, making the extensive farmland surrounding the runways, together with the adjacent Freeman Army Airfield Museum building near the airport office, useful references when inbound.
The site was selected in April 1942 for a new US Army Air Forces base, and construction of what became Freeman Army Airfield began that summer, eventually comprising a distinctive four-runway star layout. Activated in December 1942 under the 33d Twin Engine Flying Training Group, the field trained thousands of twin-engine pilot cadets through 1944, including a number of Tuskegee Airmen, and in June 1944 became the first USAAF helicopter pilot training school. In April 1945 an attempt by black officers to integrate the base officers' club led to the Freeman Field mutiny, an event regarded as a significant early milestone in the desegregation of the US armed forces. After the war the base served as a storage and evaluation depot for captured German, Italian and Japanese aircraft under Operation Lusty, before being declared surplus in December 1946 and deactivated in November 1948, when it passed to Seymour for use as a civil municipal airport.
Freeman Municipal today functions as a general aviation airport with two fixed base operators, four T-hangars and new hangar construction under consideration, fuel available on site, and based aircraft including single and multi-engine aeroplanes, helicopters and gliders. The field also hosts agricultural tenants farming leased land, two aerial survey businesses, and a facility of the Indiana National Guard's 38th Support Battalion. The Freeman Army Airfield Museum, located near the airport office, preserves artefacts and history from the wartime base, including a memorial to the Tuskegee Airmen and the Freeman Field mutiny.
