Craig Air Force Base

The name finally chosen was to honor 1st Lt Bruce Kilpatrick Craig, who was killed when his B-24 Liberator bomber crashed in June 1941.

Craig was born in Selma and was initially commissioned as an officer in the Infantry Reserve prior to transferring to the U.S. Army Air Forces and attending flight training.

[1] Army Air Forces pilot training through the first eleven months of 1941 was still considered as being peacetime and included a seventy-hour flying course.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, training was accelerated to speed the flow of pilots into combat.

The base's 29th Flying Training Wing was inactivated on 30 September 1977 and the field was placed on caretaker status the next day.

The Craig VORTAC and the Instrument Landing System (ILS) for the current Runway 33 remain operational on the field.

Current aircraft traffic averages approximately 106 daily operations, of which 83% are transient general aviation, 10% military (primarily Army, Navy and USAF training aircraft from bases in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi) and 7% local general aviation or air taxi.