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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."
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.
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Abandoned air strips are great places for concerts, fairs, cult worship ceremonies, and other gatherings.
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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.
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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
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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