Grosse Ile: the island that trained Navy pilots — including a future president

A young Navy aviator named George H.W. Bush spent part of his service flying off the southern tip of an island in the Detroit River, years before anyone called him Mr. President. The island is Grosse Ile — “big island,” the largest in the river, reached by two bridges from the Downriver mainland — and for most of the 20th century its bottom end was a roaring military airfield.

Naval Air Station Grosse Ile opened in 1927 and ran until late 1969. In World War II it swelled into one of the country’s biggest primary flight-training stations, the place where green aviators learned to keep a plane in the air before they were trusted with anything faster. More than 5,000 pilots earned their first hours here during the war. Among them were over a thousand cadets of Britain’s Royal Air Force, shipped across an ocean to learn their trade in the Michigan sky, safely out of range of the bombs falling on home.

When the Navy finally left, the field didn’t go quiet — it became the township’s own municipal airport, which it still is, with a few original base buildings standing among the hangars. The island keeps its own stubborn character besides: you can still drive onto it across a toll bridge from 1913, a green iron span that’s been charging cars and carrying pilots’ families for over a century. A small place in Wayne County that quietly helped win a war, one nervous first solo at a time.