Plum Island Airport
airport in Massachusetts, United States of America
Plum Island Airport, (FAA LID: 2B2) in Newbury, Massachusetts, is a privately owned, public-use airport owned by Historic New England and operated by Plum Island Aerodrome, Inc., a non-profit corporation. It has two runways, averages 54 flights per week, and has approximately 8 based aircraft.
History
1910 Burgess Flying Field
The first flying field in New England was on the dunes and marshes of Plum Island, about a mile and a half east of the current airport, where from April to August 1910, Marblehead yacht designer W. Starling Burgess conducted a series of test flights with biplanes that he and Augustus M. Herring designed and built.
On February 28, 1910, the first airplane flight in New England took place when Herring took off from the frozen surface of Chebacco Lake in Hamilton, Massachusetts, in a pusher biplane he and Burgess built. (Herring had first tested gliders in 1895 with the 'Father of Aviation', Octave Chanute, on the Lake Michigan dunes.) After the single flight, Burgess sold the plane and moved the operation to the marshes at Plum Island. He built a building and a wooden "runway" near where the dunes meet the marshes, about a mile south of the current entrance to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. The test range included approximately the area bounded by the dunes, the Plum Island Turnpike, High Road, and the Parker River. The aeroplane, called the Flying Fish, first made three short flights on April 17. In May Burgess brought additional aeroplanes from Marblehead and built an additional building. Tests continued through the spring and summer of 1910 with longer and higher flights.
The public source identifies “Plum Island Airport” as airport in Massachusetts, United States of America. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Plum, Island and Airport.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7205329. Authority coordinates are 42.796, -70.841. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910 and 1895.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plum Island Airport” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.