Ankang Wulipu Airport () was an airport serving the city of

Ankang Ankang () is a prefecture-level city in the south of Shaanxi Province in the People's Republic of China, bordering Hubei province to the east, Chongqing municipality to the south, and Sichuan province to the southwest. History The settl ...

Shaanxi Province Shaanxi (alternatively Shensi, see § Name) is a landlocked province of China. Officially part of Northwest China, it borders the province-level divisions of Shanxi (NE, E), Henan (E), Hubei (SE), Chongqing (S), Sichuan (SW), Gansu (W), ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

. It was located in the town of Wuli in Hanbin District, from the city center.机场简介
The new

Ankang Fuqiang Airport Ankang Fuqiang Airport is an airport in Ankang, Shaanxi province, China, located northwest of city center in the town of Wuli (formerly in Fuqiang Township, its namesake), Hanbin District. Proposed as a replacement of Ankang Wulipu Airport, the ...

replaced the Wulipu Airport when it opened on September 25, 2020.

Facilities

The airport had one runway that is 1,600 meters long and 30 meters wide (class 3C), and a 1,200 square-meter terminal building.

History

With the threat of the Empire of Japan following the

Manchurian Incident The Mukden Incident, or Manchurian Incident, known in Chinese as the 9.18 Incident (九・一八), was a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. On September 18, 1931, L ...

of 1931, General

Yang Hucheng Yang Hucheng () (26 November 1893 – 6 September 1949) was a Chinese general during the Warlord Era of Republican China and Kuomintang general during the Chinese Civil War. Yang Hucheng joined the Xinhai Revolution in his youth and had be ...

first built the airfield in Ankang in 1933 for preparations in the support of anticipated air force operations against Imperial Japanese military ambitions; this was the airbase where

Chinese Air Force The People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF; ), also known as the Chinese Air Force (中国空军) or the People's Air Force (人民空军), is an aerial service branch of the People's Liberation Army, the regular armed forces of the Peo ...

war hero Colonel Gao Zhihang transited enroute after receiving a new inventory of

Polikarpov I-16 The Polikarpov I-16 (russian: Поликарпов И-16) is a Soviet single-engine single-seat fighter aircraft of revolutionary design; it was the world's first low-wing cantilever monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear to attain o ...

fighter planes in November 1937, but was killed in a Japanese bombing attack in his next refueling stop at Zhoujiakou airfield. The airfield was deemed unsafe for use however, and was rebuilt as Wulipu in 1938, and listed as the 59th Air Station of the Nationalist Air Force of China. After the

attack on Pearl Harbor The attack on Pearl HarborAlso known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii ...

, the airport was in use by the

United States Army Air Forces The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...

Fourteenth Air Force The Fourteenth Air Force (14 AF; Air Forces Strategic) was a numbered air force of the United States Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). It was headquartered at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The command was responsible for the organiza ...

as part of the China Defensive Campaign. The Americans called the airbase Ankang Airfield, and flew photo-reconnaissance aircraft from the airport over Japanese-held territory on intelligence gathering combat missions between April and August 1945. In addition, P-61 Black Widow night interceptor aircraft provided protection against night Japanese bomber and fighter attacks from April until the end of the war in September. The Americans closed their facilities at the airport in early October 1945.Maurer, Maurer. Air Force Combat Units Of World War II. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Office of Air Force History, 1983. Civil flights first started in the 1964 but ceased in 1986. The airport was expanded to its current size in 1993 and served civil flights again from 1995 until July 2001, when the opening of the Xi'an-Ankang Railway forced the airport to close again. Flights resumed for the third time in April 2006.

References

{{authority control Ankang Airports in Shaanxi Defunct airports in China Airports established in 1938 1938 establishments in China Airfields of the United States Army Air Forces in China Airfields of the United States Army Air Forces Air Transport Command in the China-Burma-India Theater

Facilities

History

See also

References