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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."
Build big warehouses with WiFi all over the place for LAN parties?
Dude, where's my packet?
Drive-in movie revival! Seriously! That'd be awesome! I loved drive-in movies, but me local closed recently! These would be perfect!
I couldn't say how significant this is but my personal experience, from growing up in rural Minnesota in an agricultural community, is that over the last 20-30 years aerial crop dusting became a much less frequent technique for applying chemicals. My home town has a tiny airstrip that is all but unused now.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Best use for an old airfield?
An airfield!
Here in the UK we have a big problem with people wanting to shut airfields down - either town councils who want to sell the land to property developers, or people who move next to an airfield and complain about the planes.
Private Flying is not as big in the UK as it is in the US, by a long chalk, but it's still a sad thing to see airfields replaced with warehouses or the like...
By far the best thing to do with an old airfield is to open it up again - even if it's just a case of refurbishing the runway and putting a bowser (fuel truck) there.
Flying absolutely rules!
"Information wants to be paid"
Never been used? What a waste - it needs to be turned into an outdoor karting circuit. That was the best use of an old landing strip I've ever seen (and made use of).
(Though in Michigan, probably not an all-year circuit!)
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Prevent drag racing? Why? An abandoned airport is probably one of the safest places to drag, since there's no traffic to worry about.
It's funny how the government insists on preventing people from having fun. Sure, drag racing can be dangerous, but drag racers know that, and the safest place is on an abandoned runway. This will only force them to drag on the streets, where it's actually dangerous!
I did have a little look around this site before it was slashdotted. Quite interesting with plenty of satellite / aerial views of airfields. Includes a number of airfields which are only visible as silhouettes (where the tarmac has been long removed). Interestingly you can see many airfields of bomber-command in silhouette when flying over Lincolnshire in the UK.
Why oh why does slashdot post frontpage links to websites at tripod.com?? - its painfully obvious that tripod only allocates a pitiful ammount of bandwidth and this page is now unlikely to be reachable for a couple of weeks (until the story is well into the slashdot archives) The Unspoken warning to aviators here: Proceed which extreme caution when attempting to land at any unprepared field. Some of these fields have been out of service for many years and a combination of debris and weathering may have rendered the strip EXTREMELY DANGEROUS
Always make a low-pass when possible (avoiding disturbance to settlements) to inspect the strip and remember when you do land, there may be no services within reasonable distance; emergency or otherwise.
ALWAYS make sure you have either filed a flightplan or let someone know where you are going and when to expect contact from you.
Once again: Be very careful.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
not to mention bike riding. lots of free space to get up good speed, places to do some wicked jumps, drops, etc.
It might look like I'm standing motionless, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away
...which has an active, bustling little general-aviation airport--unlike the abandoned one in nearby Canton, MA--make it quite clear that in the late years of the Roaring Twenties, the local developers had Big Plans for the town. They were very proud of the airport; it was one of the things that was going to put Norwood on the map. The crash of 1929 modified a lot of those plans.
I suspect that a lot of little airfields may have started in the same way--when aviation was new, and land was plentiful and cheap--perhaps a lot of towns put them in hoping to get in on the ground floor.
Of course, there's an amazing amount of abandoned STUFF all over the place. Every place has its "lost cities" and ghost towns. Road systems for developments that were never built, military installations that were abandoned, etc. etc. It's just that anything abandoned rapidly becomes invisible--names vanish even from the topographic map, and unless you investigate on the ground or are curious about aerial photos, how are you ever going to know they are there?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
From the comments I am surprised at how few people here fly small planes. There are over 9000 airstrips in the US and over 100,000 small planes. If you don't understand about flying just start with the AOPA website (aircraft owners and pilots association).
The small strips need to stay as small strips so people can get around via aircraft. Once they are gone, they never come back.
It's a fucked up world where some Darwin Award candidate can tresspass on your property, hurt themselves, and then sue you for failing to protect them from thier own stupidity.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
An abandoned airfield is about as likely as an abandoned road. As a pilot with an inexpensive bush plane I fight to keep airports open so that I can actually use them. The sad fact of the matter is that even with large increases in population, standards of living, and technology, aviation continues to become relatively more expensive and there are many fewer airports today than there were even fifty years ago... and the number continues to shrink. It isn't that no one wants to take off and land on them. To the contrary it is because most people don't fly in general aviation aircraft and know next to nothing about aviation, so a single developer, politician, or nearby resident often wields enough power to misinform and negatively influence an entire community.
Most people don't realize what a rare freedom general aviation flight is and has been in this country. Almost no one I speak with seems to realize how much their community benefits from small airports (consider things like medical, business travel, express shipping, newspapers, cleared checks, etc.) or how tragic and irreversible the death of an airport is. This is why it is critical that anyone interested in aviation try to involve others in the community, even when it means shelling money out of your own pocket to give first timers free flights and talk with them about aviation! I do it all the time.
Even though it's within most people's grasp, there are far fewer than a million pilots in the United States and probably half of those are professionals. Most folks are lucky if they know anyone who is a rated pilot. For about seven grand or so and about 75 hours of flight time you can obtain a private pilot rating which is good as long as you comply with the law and are medically fit to fly. We need more private pilots to defend our airports and our right to fly, not to mention just to share the freedom and beauty of that third dimension.