Wings Over Alexandria Air Show 2025
Story and photos by Del Laughery
When you navigate to www.photorecon.net, you are typically greeted with coverage of large aviation events and significant aviation subjects. But recently I had the opportunity to attend a much more intimate (spelled: s-m-a-l-l-e-r) event known as Wings Over Alexandria, a new annual air show and fly-in event at Chandler Field, Alexandria, MN.
Chandler Field (KAXN) is an uncontrolled airport boasting two runways – approximately 5100 and 4100 feet in length – and about 26,000 aircraft operations per year, mostly general aviation. The airport was established in the 1920s as a grass strip known as Raiter’s Pasture. By the late 1930s, as the specter of WWII loomed in the distance, the U.S. Army Air Corps eyed the field and by 1940 had acquired the property and built two paved runways – the very runways still in use today.
During the war, the airport served as a stopover point for military aircraft travelling between the east and west coasts, as well for aircraft headed to Alaska (and ultimately Russia). Soon after the war, the airport was named after WWII pilot Harold Chandler, who would eventually become the airport manager. Today the field is a public use airport owned by the town of Alexandria.
After WWII, the airport saw periods of commercial airline service from Wisconsin Central Airlines (which became North Central Airlines, then merged with Southern Airways, which became Republic Airlines, which merged into Northwest Airlines) and Mississippi Valley Airlines, but no service exists today despite the local area being a fishing and outdoor activities vacation destination.
The airshow, which occurred on June 14, 2025, was hampered by very low ceilings. At the start of the day, cloud bases were approximately 300 feet. This doesn’t leave much room for vertical maneuvers, so the first four of five acts were abbreviated and limited to high-speed passes over the runway, through by later in the day, ceilings had come up a bit and the Beech 18 flown by Matt Younkin managed to get some aileron rolls into his routine. The other aircraft, three from Fagan Fighters (P-51D, P-40K, and BT-13), and a Gulfstream G-164B bi-plane, were all flat passes in front of the crowd. But you get what you get from mother nature and the air show staff did their absolute best with the recipe mother nature cooked up for them, meteorologically speaking. We photographers had to make due as well.
If you live in the mid-west, keep an eye on the 2026 calendar for next year’s event. The air show’s small stature provides nice views of the aerial acts along a pleasantly long crowd line and the people you’ll encounter are “Minnesota nice.” So, bring a folding chair and come on up and sit a spell.
