K.I. Sawyer Heritage Air Museum is proud to announce the launch of it's very own forums!

The forums will provide a great way to keep in touch with friends and family of those who served at K.I. Sawyer AFB. Forums members will have the ability to post photos, share stories and reconnect with long-lost friends and fellow service people from years gone past.

Best of all - It's FREE! You will need to create an account on the forums - we suggest using your full name for the account so other members will recognize and be able to contact you there.

FYI - a forums admin will approve your account and you will receive an email notification once that happens. Because of this please use an email account you check on a regular basis. We also suggest checking your spam / junk mail folders for the reply - just in case it gets caught by that.

To visit our new forums - CLICK HERE or the "Forums" Quick Link button on the left side of every website page.

See you on the forums!
- The K.I. Sawyer Heritage Air Museum Staff

K.I. Sawyer AFB was a favorite base among the SAC community. Although isolated and definitely northern, it was an attractive base for its pleasing North Woods location and its proximity to outdoor activities off the base, including hunting, fishing, boating, and winter sports (including Marquette Mountain, "Cliffs Ridge" until 1982), as well as the venues on site (base lake, ski hill, and others).

While the base was sometimes referred to as "K.I. Siberia" and there was an abundance of lake effect snow, it was not the bitter sub-zero temperatures and wind chills and hot summers of the tree-sparse North Dakota bases, or the confinement of the bases in the more established communities of the northeastern states. Locals maintained that the K.I. Sawyer runway was built over some of the best blueberry fields in the state. Berry patches remained on many other parts of the base, and families of aircrew members often picked them near the alert barracks and the family center.

A portion of the operational section of K.I. Sawyer AFB has been converted into Sawyer International Airport, which opened its passenger terminal for service in September 1999. It replaced the smaller Marquette County Airport, just southwest of Marquette, as the region's primary civilian airport.

In recent years, a group of local citizens interested in preserving the historical significance of the base have collected six aircraft of the types used actively at various times through the base's history to be displayed near the airport. The program is known as the "Sawyer 6" project.