Orphans' Home

A $1,000,000 Skymotive Terminal formally opens this week at Chicago's O'Hare Field, the first terminal of any size ever built especially for company planes, personnel and executive passengers. Traditionally orphans of the air, business planes get short shrift at most big U.S. airports; executives and guests, says Shell Oil's Chief Pilot Bob Porter, '"have to go through mud and weeds to some back-alley hangar." The Skymotive Terminal was so welcome that it was booked to capacity even before its opening.

Skymotive is the idea of John P. ("Jock") Henebry, who was a colonel in the Army Air Forces during World War II, was the youngest (then 32) general when he went back into service during the Korean war. Between wars, he opened a plane repair station at O'Hare Field in 1946; in the same year, the Government deeded land around his station to Chicago for use as a municipal airport (to begin scheduled passenger airline operations late this month, relieving Chicago's Midway Airport, and eventually to be the world's biggest). Many of Henebry's early customers were businessmen, and after he got out of the Air Force in 1952, he found that "this business aircraft thing really got rolling."*

Henebry borrowed money and sold stock to raise $750,000, got a 20-year lease on 2 1/2 acres around his old repair shop, set to work on the Skymotive Terminal. It includes a 400-ft.-long hangar (space rental and normal services: $575 a month for a DC-3, $55 for a Beechcraft Bonanza), a modern two-story terminal building with lounge, office space ($28.50 to $80 a month), conference room, flight-planning room, kitchen and bath facilities.

*There are now about 22,000 business planes in the U.S. v. 2,500 in 1946. Last year they flew farther than U.S. scheduled airlines on domestic routes: an estimated 546 million plane miles v. 525 million.

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