The location of the first Lihu‘e Airport, also known as the Wailua Airport, comprised part of the present site of the Kaua‘i Beach Resort and extended southward on flat land along the coast for about 2,000 feet to where a
The location of the first Lihu‘e Airport, also known as the Wailua Airport, comprised part of the present site of the Kaua‘i Beach Resort and extended southward on flat land along the coast for about 2,000 feet to where a rest room building and a parking area are now situated.
The airport’s runway was completed by nearly 100 men employed by the federally funded Civil Works Administration, or CWA, between December 1933 and the airport’s opening in March 1934.
The CWA, by the way, was established during the Great Depression under President Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide temporary work for millions of unemployed nationwide.
Other work included construction of a loading ramp by the County of Kaua‘i and an airways station built by local contractors.
Airport operations began on the morning of March 8, 1934, when the first plane landed at the new airport, an eight-passenger Inter-Island Airways Sikorsky S-38 amphibian piloted from Honolulu by Chief Pilot Charles I. Elliott.
Greeting it upon its arrival was Hanama‘ulu School’s eighth grade chorus and Mrs. Y. T. Lai, the principal of the school.
The airport’s runway was long enough to accommodate the S-38’s takeoff distance of approximately 2,000 feet, but was too short for the larger, 16-passenger Sikorsky S-43 amphibians introduced by Inter-Island Airways in 1935, so in 1938, the Civil Aeronautics Administration restricted use of Lihu‘e Airport to planes no larger than the S-38.
Inter-Island Airways served Kaua‘i thereafter at its Port Allen airfield only, until that airfield was closed for the duration of WWII. The airline then utilized the Barking Sands airfield, in use since the early 1920s.
Operations had ceased at the first Lihu‘e Airport when the modern, present-day Lihu‘e Airport off Ahukini Road opened in 1950.
