Harrison Ford hasn’t been seen in Wichita for 2 years. Here’s the likely reason:
The last time mega movie star Harrison Ford was spotted publically in Wichita was aboard a United Airlines flight leaving the Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport on March 7, 2024.
Ford had been in town that week for one of his annual visits, which had for years happened like clockwork in January, February or March and always coincided with his need to train on a Cessna flight simulator and have his Cessna Citation serviced.
During those visits, Ford would be spotted dining at local restaurants or shopping for shoes and phone chargers at local stores, and he’d always gamely pose for photos with locals who noticed him. Wichita, in turn, was generally respectful of the star and would wait until he was done eating to approach him. They’d often quietly pick up his restaurant tab.
But on that March 7 two years ago, Ford flew away on a commercial flight to Denver, posing on the plane for a selfie with a Cheney High School art teacher who was also on his flight.
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And that was the last time Wichita saw Harrison Ford, the Oscar- and Emmy- nominated star of “Star Wars” movies and of the recent Apple TV hit “Shrinking.”
Now, an expert on Harrison Ford’s relationship with Wichita says he thinks he knows why the star has ghosted the city. It’s not good news.
Graham High, a documentary film producer based in Los Angeles who lived in Wichita until he was 9, has for the past three years been working on a film project about the city’s obsession with Harrison Ford, fueled by the star’s frequent visits. The title of his film, which he hopes to have out this fall (and really hopes to premiere at October’s Tallgrass Film Festival) is “Ford Comes to Wichita.”
High, whose production resume includes work on documentaries such as “Nobu” and “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid”, has visited Wichita four times since he and his sister, fellow film producer Brittany High, started work on the film in 2023. They hoped to encounter Ford, now 83, during one of their visits over the years, but their primary goal was to “be in the city when the excitement of Harrison was going on,” High said.
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During their visits, they’d interviewed locals about the Ford phenomenon, which has been going on at least since the early 2000s, when the star posed for one of his most famous Wichita photos with the owner of Connie’s Mexico Cafe, 2227 N. Broadway. Among the people that the High siblings interviewed for their film: Jack “Hatman Jack” Kellogg, Sabor owner Melad Stephan and me — the Wichita Eagle reporter who’s been documenting Ford’s visits since 2017.
When High realized recently that Ford was about to miss his usual window for a Wichita visit for the second year in a row, he did some sleuthing that included trading theories with celebrity jet tracker Jack Sweeney, whose website (formerly celebrityprivatejettracker.com, now called Ground Control) he’d relied on for years to determine when Ford would be flying in and out of Wichita.
Sweeney gained worldwide attention for using publically available data to track the comings and goings of celebrities’ private jets (Taylor Swift, Elon Musk and Mark Cuban among them) and posting his findings online. He subsequently drew the ire of several celebrities, including Swift, whose lawyers threatened legal action over his activities.
Graham and Sweeney put their heads together and determined that Ford’s Wichita era is probably over. On Tuesday, Sweeney posted an article that detailed their rationale.
According to the article, Ford — a longtime pilot and the owner of a green-and-white Cessna Citation Sovereign with the tail number N6GU — usually flew to Wichita to undergo recurrent simulator training at FlightSafety International — training he needed to keep his certifications current.
But FlightSafety International moved its Cessna Citation Sovereign simulator out of Wichita, and now the only two simulators are in Orlando, Florida, and in Atlanta. High’s research, backed up by a post from a public Citation Facebook group, found that the simulator left Wichita in the summer of 2024, several months after Ford’s last visit.
Sweeney cited data showing that Ford’s plane flew from Los Angeles to Orlando in October of last year and remained there from Oct. 19 to Oct. 23. On Oct. 21, Mauricio Frizzarin — a pilot, aviation enthusiast and founder of a Brazilian technology company, snapped a selfie with Ford at Orlando’s Flight Safety facility and posted it on Instagram. In the photo, both men are wearing lanyards with the Flight Safety logo.
Ford also used to have his plane serviced while he was in Wichita for Flight Safety training, High said. But there’s also a Cessna service center in Mesa, Arizona, and flight data shows that Ford’s plane has recently been traveling to Mesa.
“He used to bring it to Wichita, kind of like a two-for-one,” High said. “They service his plane, and then he gets his flight safety, and then he heads home. So it’s not that he will never, ever come back to Wichita, but his obligations to Wichita have gone elsewhere.”
So long, Han Solo
If he’s correct, High said, his documentary won’t end the way he initially envisioned it. But he still plans to return to Wichita at least one more time to finish up some filming before he puts “Ford Comes to Wichita” together.
He decided to make the documentary, he said, after hearing from relatives about Ford’s frequent visits. He and his sister looked at the project as a way to get to know Wichita a little better.
The whole thing was just so . . . charming, High said.
“I think Harrison is the perfect celebrity for Wichita,” he said. “He’s down to earth. He has a good sense of humor. He’s a craftsman. He has a respect for aviation. I thought about, ’If it was any other celebrity that was flying to Wichita once a year, would I be so enthusiastic about pursuing the story?’ And I don’t think so. I think Harrison is on a very short list of people I’m interested in who Wichita would relate to.”
High feels for the people of Wichita, who got to know their adopted celebrity’s habits well enough that they knew where he liked to sit and what he liked to order at certain local restaurants. They knew that he’d stay at the Hyatt Regency Wichita when he was in town. They that knew he wasn’t above a Chipotle run.
When word got out that he was in town, local businesses would even get in on the fun, tagging Ford on social media and offering various bribes if he stopped by. McConnell Air Force Base once offered to take him up on a KC-135. A local radio station said that if he visited, he could play any music he wanted.
And Ford kind of liked Wichita back — at least that’s how it felt. He would visit with restaurant owners and sign autographs for their kids. He would pose for photographs with groups of school children, with restaurant servers and with fellow diners. Ford even once exhibited extreme patience with a Star Wars megafan who drove to Wichita from Iowa, followed him to Flight Safety, and asked him to sign his custom-designed “Star Wars” pickup truck.
High doesn’t blame Wichita for feeling a bit jilted. But he reminds Wichita that nothing is stopping Ford from coming back just to say hi.
“It’s sad that it’s ending, but it’s good for the documentary in that I finally need to finish up the edit and come to terms with it,” High said. “I think it’s a nice close of the chapter of the Harrison saga, and in a way, I think the documentary will be a way for people in Wichita to appreciate the time that we had with Harrison sightings.”
This story was originally published March 12, 2026 at 5:03 AM.
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