Willow Run Bomber Plant

01 / The story of this place

Make time for these

Ford Motor Company built the Willow Run plant starting in 1940 and had it running by 1942 to mass-produce Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers for the war effort, applying Ford's assembly-line methods to aircraft on a scale no one had tried before. Charles E. Sorensen, Ford's hard-driving production chief who had already built the Highland Park and Rouge assembly lines, planned the plant and pushed it toward the goal of finishing a bomber an hour, a rate the factory eventually reached. Willow Run turned out more than eight thousand B-24s before the war ended, employing tens of thousands of workers, many of them women dubbed 'Rosie the Riveter.' The plant kept building other products for decades afterward, but most of the sprawling Albert Kahn-designed building was torn down in 2013 and 2014 despite preservation efforts. A 175,000-square-foot section was saved, and it now houses the Michigan Flight Museum, formerly the Yankee Air Museum, which reopened there in 2017.

1. Built by Ford starting in 1940, running by 1942
2. Charles E. Sorensen planned the plant and drove its mass-production methods
3. Produced more than 8,000 B-24 Liberator bombers during World War Two
4. Most of the building demolished 2013–2014; a saved section is now the Michigan Flight Museum