The Fort Smith Regional Airport is a mixed-use airport located three miles southeast of Fort Smith (Sebastian County). The airport has two asphalt runways and scheduled commercial aviation to airports in Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas. The initial ideas for an airport date back to the Depression era. In 1939, two sod runways, built on land purchased with a municipal bond authorized in 1936, opened for business. The initial decade saw improvements such as hangars (1941) and paving of the runways (1945). During expansion projects, the two runways were extended from their initial length of 3,500 feet to 8,000 feet for the longer runway and 5,000 feet for the shorter. Construction of the control tower in 1951 permitted greater …