During World War II, workers at a sprawling desert hangar in Goodyear took Army bombers flown in from across the country and fundamentally reshaped them for naval warfare, slicing off twin tails and rebuilding the aircraft into long-range patrol planes bound for the Pacific.
“People don’t always realize how dramatic that change was,” said Darryl Burton, development manager for the property now known as Flite Goodyear. “They were taking a plane designed for one mission and turning it into a completely different aircraft with a single large tail. That’s a major structural change.”
The hangar, now a mixed-use commercial and warehouse complex home to about 140 small businesses, began life in the early 1940s as a Goodyear Aircraft Company facility. Built after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became part of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the nation’s “arsenal of democracy,” modifying B-24 Liberator bombers into PB4Y-2 Privateer reconnaissance aircraft for the U.S. Navy.
