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."
We have quite a few here in Britian but they're nearly all World War II.
So why does the US have so many? Having a quick look they seem mostly military.
A blog I run for the wealth
Abandoned air strips are great places for concerts, fairs, cult worship ceremonies, and other gatherings.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I've done a lot of flying all over southwest Arizona, and there are a ton of little airfields out there, many of them in a 3-runway triangle configuration, that apparently used to be used for military training. I've seen a bunch of them that had been turned into little neighborhoods. In a way it reminds me of those post-apocalypse movies where people make primitive use of old abandoned technology.
Evil is the money of root.
Take a look at the amount of abandoned train tracks throughout america, it's extremely sad.
Back on topic. The one group that does know of the existance of all of these small little airfields is the DEA. With a small prop engine plane able to land nearly anywhere that's fairly long and flat it makes it virtually impossible to make any attempt to stop these planes from landing and dropping their loot.
With the infrared technology (nightvision) and other GPS devices these planes can fly in the dead of night during a new moon phase with no lights on and still relatively safely land and takeoff. So yes, these are not forgotten air strips, but there are some that wished they were.
Even more unrelated, where the hell do you get gas. Seeing as I've never flown a plane and definantelly not the lawnmower with wings kind. How does one go about getting gas? Do you just really fill up the tank, or in a pinch can you throw some standard disel in there? Always bugged me because I've never seen a plane gas station before, seen them for cars and boats, just never planes.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
How do people who are... say... interested in things like Drag Racing get access to such air strips (preferrably legally)?
Airfields like this would be a great way to keep people who are just interested in racing recreationally (and who dont want to go to the track), off public streets.
The information isn't cheap to come by because it is updated so often and used by so few, but a lot of smaller airports are public knowledge. Private pilots know where to get it. But really, all a small Cessna needs to take off or land is about 1/2 mile of relatively flat terrain. If conditions were right an experienced pilot could land on a well-mowed field or dirt road. But most established airports with attended hangars & other services are listed on charts e.g. the ones from Jeppesen.
And the reason nobody ever sees aviation fuel pumps is because you're never at little airports like this. Even small planes fly much faster than cars can travel, so they're not always closely spaced, but believe me, they're everywhere. Probably at least one to a county (in the midwest.)
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
I have a lovely abandoned air strip out on my farm in northern Indiana.
My uncles and family friends used it for about 50 years, starting in 1938, but people built a paved one not too far from town. So everybody stwitched. I think, around this little town, there were 6 or 7 air fields. Most are being cultivated, but I think ours and my great uncle's can still function, reflectors and all.
Frank used to (I don't know if he still is able) give flights over the gorge and Fayetteville for $5 (hence he was known as Five-Dollar-Frank), for $7 he'd take you up the river to Thurmond. A rare treasure to be seized while it's available.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's my token plug for Canada ...
An abandoned airfield at Gimli, Manitoba, saved the lives of dozens of passengers in 1986, when a brand new Air Canada 767 on a flight from Ottawa to Edmonton glided to an emergency landing after running out of fuel in mid-air. The 767 calculated fuel in metric units, unlike most older aircraft, which confused the flight crew and resulted in an inadequate fuel load.
Ironically, the crew that Air Canada sent to recover the aircraft got lost on their way to Gimli and ended up running out of gas.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Be sure to check out this page.
In my many years of travels working as a flight crewman for a well known commercial airship company, I spent many many days in those massive blimp hangars.
They are truly national landmarks, and are breathtaking to see. Both inside and out, they are unbelievable. As the page says, they are the largest wooden structures in the world.
While I was there, MCAS Tustin was still operational, but there were talks of destroying at least one of the hangars. The other was to become either a museum or something else.
Now that The base has been officially closed, friends from the area said that those plans have been scrapped, and both hangars will be destroyed.
This is truly a shame, since these hangars have such history in them. Also, they are tremendously usefull for the current airship industry. Sometimes, the airship has to be hangared, and you can't exactly stuff one into a normal sized hangar. There aren't too many hangars this big left in the US, and it would be a terrible shame to destroy them.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
OK, I know it's off-topic kinda, but we have some cool abadoned Tube Stations[demon.co.uk] in London.
The tube (London's underground rail system) network is the largest in the world and there are a lot of old tube stations that were abandoned due to improvments to existing stations and changes in the organisation of the lines. They are all mainly closed off, though you can still see some above ground.
Perhaps a little more spooky than abandoned airfields mainly because they have never been redeveloped. Some still have the old advertising in them from the 40's/50's.
Just something I thought some people might find interesting...
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
See, planes can share a strip with autosports......
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
I was hunting on some property a friend of mine owns and here in the middle of this field is a tattered old wind sock and a broken down hanger. I checked an old USGS map and there it was, some old airfield.
A much different experience was seeing the massive B-29 airfields on the island of Guam. I suppose they have been turned into tourist hotels and streets by now.
Some years ago a friend and I were flying out to Wendover airfield in Utah for a weekend of drinking and blackjack at the casinos there. (Hey, we were 21 at the time and had nothing else better to do with our time that weekend). Wendover field was where the crews for the planes that dropped the first atomic bomb trained (and believe it or not, some of the craters of the big conventional bombs have filled in with hot spring water making decent winter scuba destinations). At any rate, we were flying west and getting ready for the routine radio call announcing our intentions to land and flight path (Wendover does not have a tower), when we get this radio message saying "Wendover flight control" telling us not to deviate from our current flight path and to announce our intentions and destination. We do and they give us explicit instructions on which runway to land on and NOT to deviate from those instructions.
We got to Wendover and as we flew over, there was a tremendous amount of military activity with F-16's parked on the tarmac and one of the runways, a couple of CH-53's and armed troops all over the place. We taxied up, tied the plane down and proceeded to walk back to the "pilots lounge" to close our flight plan when we were stopped by a private who demonstrated convincingly he was locked and loaded. I eventually calmed him down by asking for his superior officer to get his ass out there and to lower his weapon when one of the F-16 pilots came out apologizing and explaining things were a little tense after his plane and another lost engine power forcing his wingman to eject over the test range. He managed to bring his plane to Wendover and was the F-16 parked on one of the runways with the hole blown in the top half of the fuselage.
Weird. We were allowed to go on our way, and came back to the Wendover airport the next day to fly home only to find everyone gone. Our plane was the only thing on the tarmac and we never did hear what happened other than there was an F-16 lost over the west desert.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I used to have friends who'd buy avgas from the local airport for their cars. Before they discovered nitrous ( and melted pistons ) they were all into domes pistons and shaved heads for high compression. You needed some seriously high octane gas to avoid engine knock and back then avgas was cheaper than buying additives ( and safer than using mothballs ) and this was also before the local gulf stations started selling racing gas.
This space for rent.
I was always wondering about this. The history is quite interesting and thorough. It's located in Idaho. It's where they developed the nuclear jet engine.
Sadly, the website has exceeded it's alloted slashdotting (it's tripod), but it's worth going back for the read.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
You could come to Sweden on vacation and go on the Inlandsbanan ("the inland railway") for an old fashioned railway experience. Beside several options for travelling a long way with old trains, there are places where you can rent/borrow a trolley and safely go long ways. There are about one train per day on these tracks.
I have not done this myself, but there is plenty of information on the Internet about it. Of course, you may have wanted this on a different continent...
Reality or nothing.
There is a strip of metal barrier across the middle of the runway - probably to dissuade use as a dragstrip or to discourage its use by smaller planes. It's pretty impressive to walk right down the centre of an airstrip (the disused terminal is at the Ockham end of the strip, not far from a pretty decent pub).
You can see the strip on this map.
For a small jet you *could* just put diesel in there, like if the feds were bearing down on you and that's all you had, but you wouldn't be happy about it.
Conversely, if you happen to have a diesel car, it will run very nicely on Jet-A. My CFII flies a Beech King Air for a company, and he always parks his 2002 VW Bug with the Turbo Diesel in the hangar. When the fuel truck guys come by to fill up the airplane (a couple hundred gallons at a time), they throw a couple extra gallons into his car out of courtesy. Consequently, he never has to buy his own gas (and he gets like 58mpg anyway).
And if there isn't enough air traffic to pay for said arifield - here's another suggested use: rent the thing out to car clubs a couple of days a week - we're always looking for somewhere to test top speds, different brakes, chassis components, engine and turbo configurations and airfields are ideal. Trouble is - just as people have moved next door to an airfield and complained about the noise - it seems there is growing belief that motorsport is a quiet pastime, with noise regs down as low as 85Db on some tracks!! Racing Milk Floats anyone?
With the cost of train tickets in the UK seemingly calculated in Lira, It's a wonder the sky isn't filled with light aircraft.
Lots of rural airstrips never had tarmac in the first place -- they were always grass or dirt, and maintained as well as whoever most often uses them cares to bother. Some are kept completely smooth, others make you wonder if someone recently bombed 'em. Some have reflective markers from end to end, with others you're lucky to have a row of rocks indicating where someone got tired of moving rocks.
Funny story involving tarmac: the Bozeman/Belgrade MT airport (which I used to live right next to) has a "retired" area that is now used for training the local fire dept. One day they set a practice grass fire, sortof failing to notice the adjacent and overgrown asphalt runway -- which caught fire. We had great gobs of black smoke for 3 days, til they finally got it put out.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It actually can be, depending on where you are and how much activity there is. Not so much the trains, though some people do get into that; but more interesting is the old infrastructure and little ghost towns along the way.
Of course, here in the Age of Level Orange, da bulls get a little testy when they see someone hanging around near the yard, and they're just as likely to call the Federales as not...I've heard of several people being harrassed for pursuing their lifelong hobby watching trains...
Trev
Try living in Alaska for a few years without them. Especially in Alaska, they're not joyriders so much as people carrying mail, supplies, other people.
While I'm very sensitive to what I feel is the encroachment of noise and pollution into every possible pore of this nation, in Alaska the airplanes are what make the place inhabitable by carrying the supplies needed to function in today's world. And much of that is done by "Private" aircraft used by commercial operators. Pipers, Cessnas, Beechcraft; they're all used extensively by commercial operators in Alaska.
There are no roads to many communities in Alaska. Without aviaion, they'd be isolated and abandoned by the rest of the world.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Here's a site promoting General Aviation with a map of public and private airports (click on the link near the bottom to see the map). According to the map, there are 5,400 public-use airports in the U.S. compared to 12,945 private airports. (And only 30 airports handle 70% of airline traffic.) Pretty interesting site for information about light planes.
- Make sure the regional airports are aware the "abandoned" strips are being put to new use.
- Watch out for Gimli Gliders
A friend of mine knows a few people that were on the strip at the time of the landing, there was no warning, no sound, nothing. One of the guys looked up and saw the 767 bearing down on the strip; literally in front of him. Suddenly things got interesting...
Merlin.
in College Park Airport is one of the small airports that is in trouble. The general aviation rule changes put in place since September 11th have made it difficult for them to maitain anything resembling normal operations. The airport, established in 1909 by Orville and Wilbur Wright may have to close
I have been told by a retired Airforce serviceman that Interstate highways are used for emergency runways. As I have been told, after a certain stretch of an Interstate highway it is required that there be a 1 or 1.5 mile straightaway. The person who told me said the strips can be used by the military for emergency purposes. I am not sure how long the stretch is in between straightaways. I have not researched this, so please don't take my word to be 100% true. Although I have no reason to believe my source would have lied to me about it, it was a "matter of fact" comment when discussing roadways. If I think about the 4 hour drive I take to my parents house, all on I-95, I do recall a lot of short straightaways, but I could be wrong. Has anyone else heard about this? Is it true? Urban ledgend? FYI, he told me this before 9/11 so attribute this to a crazy military person ready for war.