Slashdot Mirror
Abandoned & Little Used Airfields
KiranWolf writes "I ran across this page doing some research on a local historical landmark. It has detailed histories and photos of more than 500 abandoned and little used airfields throughout the U.S., many of them dating back to the heyday of aviation. It's rather amazing how many small unknown airfields dot the landscape."
The east and especially the south coast of Britain has possibly the highest concentration of disused airfields anywhere, dating back from the war. Fields in the south east were to ensure a wide spread of fighter cover, and airfields further north in counties such as Lincolnshire and Essex were bomber bases.
Many of these have dissappeared completely; some remain as private airfields, while others are converted for other purposes such as racetracks.
"Cattle Prods solve most of life's little problems."
Deffinately do not put diesel in your plane, unless you happen to be flying a WWII era Mescerschmitt (designed to run on deisel because more refined fuels were scarce). The reason you never see a plane gas station (though they do exist), is because fuel is usually delivered via fuel truck; a commercial vehicle with a big tank, pump, and hoses attached.
wait...
In Soviet Russia, you do not get airplane gas,
the avgas gets you!
(always wanted to do that one)
Anyhow, there are various grades of aviation fuel, everything from kerosine and derivatives that the jets burn to 110 octane Low Lead, 100 octane, and avgas (essentially what you put in your car). The fuels are injected with color-coded dyes do you can check to see if you've got the right gas in your plane. 110LL (the most comon variety for small prop planes) is blue. If you mix another fuel type in with it, the dyes are designed to combine chemically, and the fuel becomes clear.
As much as I'd love to own my own airstrip (I've been a licensed pilot longer than I've been licensed to drive a car), it's a regulatory nightmare to get one operating. Even as just a private strip, you've got everything from zoning commisions to public noise ordinances to deal with (in the U.S. anyhow).
Need a simple, easy to use data tier generator? http://www.gryphinsoftware.com/
I guess I should have been more precise as to which point I considered a legend.
From http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp
--
Claim: The American interstate highway system was designed to be used for emergency airstrips in case of war.
Status: False.
Origins: Numerous folks swear Interstate highways in the United States must be designed so that one mile in every five is perfectly straight and flat. According to this whispered bit of facetious lore, if the U.S. ever comes under attack, those straight, flat stretches will be used as landing strips.
Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Infrastructure and the FHA's unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a "National System of Interstate Highways"). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it. (A few countries do use some of their roads as military air strips, however.)
Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it's part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any "one-in-five" requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either.
--