UT’s first airplane, acquired in 1965, was an Aero Commander seating six people, acquired through a gift-purchase arrangement. The plane crashed in 1978.
In December 1966 E. Ward King, chairman of the board of Mason Dixon Lines Inc. and a former member of the UT Development Council, gave UT a second plane, The General, which was a 20-seat Convair 240 and was intended to transport athletics teams to out-of-town games. UT painted the plane orange and white and increased the seating capacity to 25.
UT was given another plane, a DC-3, by Sears Roebuck, which crashed at Dulles International Airport on January 18, 1969, three days after UT received it.
UT purchased a 1978 King Air 200 turbo prop in 1985. The King Air 200 seated eight. UT replaced the King Air 200 with a nine-seat King Air 350 in September 2007. The King Air 350 cost $4.4 million, after trading the King Air 200 for $825,000. The $4.4 million used to purchase the plane came from reserve funds accrued by the university for several years and set aside for the renewal of major capital assets.
UT has also operated two research aircraft. In 1968 Mr. Harry Bradley, of Houston Aviation Products, gave the university a DC-3 airliner valued in excess of $25,000 ($140,000 when new). This aircraft was specially outfitted for research projects requiring airborne facilities capable of making photographic and radar studies of the earth’s surface and of making active passive, microwave, and infrared studies. Mr. Bradley, a native Tennessean, had no direct ties to UT but thought the research program worthy of support. In 1971 the board of trustees authorized the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI) to accept a Cessna 310A twin-engine plane that was offered by the US Air Force for use in research projects. It was to be used as a “flying laboratory” for graduate-level courses in aeronautical engineering, specifically in the field of experimental flight mechanics. The Cessna was declared surplus and sold in April 1996.
In 2010 UTSI first flew its highly instrumented Piper Navajo Airborne Science Research Aircraft under the airborne science research program made possible through funding by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).