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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."
I can't say that there's much to talk about here... (First Post! *laugh*)
But in my hometown of Galesburg, Michigan, there is a city park that is also a combination landing strip. It's never actually been used.
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as potential autocross locations.
My favorite is Big Beaver Airport in Michigan. I kid you not - Big Beaver is Exit 69 on Interstate 75.
could one of these airfields be where my luggage ended up?
Just wondering...
-Goran
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Dude, where's my packet?
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.
"I only speak the truth"
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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.
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
Drive-in movie revival! Seriously! That'd be awesome! I loved drive-in movies, but me local closed recently! These would be perfect!
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 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.
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Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
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).
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Why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?
Ive always been suprised at how many airfields dot the KS landscape! I know there are 3-4 just outside the Wichita City Limits.
A ir fields_KS_W.htm
http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freeman/KS/
That talks about Hutch airport. Airplanes still fly out of there and a lot of richy-rich types fly the short drive to Hutch to do antique shopping and shit like that up there.
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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
near where the planes park. Just like they do for cars really. If you don't go where the plane's park, you won't see a gas station for them.
I mean, really, it would be pretty silly to have a plane gas station at the mall, wouldn't it? So they put them back behind the hangers at *airports.*
If you're talking light prop driven planes, yes, you just put gas in them. No you do *not* put diesel in them because they aren't diesel motors.
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.
You want to see a plane gas station? It's as easy as going to the local small airport and asking.
KFG
I was surprised that they did not mention the airstrip at Disney World in Florida, adjacent to the approach road to the Magic Kingdom. Perhaps because it is no longer recognized by the FAA, and is instead being used for bus staging.
According to this page, Imagineers built grooves into the runway which would cause aircraft axles to rattle off "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" upon take-off or landing.
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
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"
If you're into abandoned airstrips, you should try trainspotting.
Now that's some truly exciting shit!
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...
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See, planes can share a strip with autosports......
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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Slashdotted a tripod.com page -- doh!
Check here: google cache
Google's cache is one of my most favorite features on the 'net in a long time...
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I think we just ran over that page. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
and there is virtually no more places you can find 100/130 leaded avgas for sale anymore... you can special-order it in 55 gallon drums from some specialty fuels distributor in California and is used mostly only by air racers anymore. You can also get the 115/145 leaded avgas (colored rich dark purple) this way, but it cost about $25-30 per gallon.
100LL (blue color) is a misnomer, because it's lead level is not very "low" at all. It has up to 2 grams per gallon of tetraethyl lead. 80/87 only has a max of 0.5 grams pre gallon of TEL. 80/87 leaded "regular" avgas has almost disappeared from the market, forcing many pilots who need the lower octane, truly low lead fuel to have to buy unleaded auto fuel and mix it in about a 3:1 ratio with 100LL. With so many auto gasoline suppliers now contaminating their gas with ethanol (which means a significant amount of water getting in the gas too due to hygroscopic nature of ethanol), pilots cannot use auto fuel in many parts of the country because at altitude, the temperature drops and the ethanol/water will freeze in the fuel lines resulting in engine stoppage.... not good.
Hopefully soon, the new 82 octane unleaded avgas (colored light purple) will be put into production and available thru distribution channels soon.
There also are programs to develop a pure ethanol aviation fuel (E-85) but that requires both the aircraft and engines to be specifically engineered to keep the fuel systems sealed from the atmosphere (to keep water vapor out), keep fuel system pressurized with dry nitrogen, and possibly also keep it heated too. Of course ethanol has much lower calories of useful energy in it per mass, so useful load and range of these aircraft are greatly reduced.
...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!
...all your abandoned airfield are belong to us!
at airnav.com you can browse by state, search by city, etc...
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.
http://www.aopa.org
AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association)lobbies to keep airports open and keep down the cost of flying.
Flying is a lot of fun. If you like flight simulators, you can try the real thing for about $50 at almost any small airport.
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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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.
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you sir, are certianly in the right place.
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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.
--
- 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
Here are some other sites to look at along the same theme as the abandoned airfields site...
http://www.nelsap.org - New England Lost Ski Areas Project
http://www.coloradoskihistory.com/History.html - has a page about "lost" ski areas in Colorado
http://www.forgotten-ny.com - good site for the lost treasures that are hidden around in the urban decay of New York
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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.
It's an urban legend:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp
Of course, since interstate highways are federal property, I don't suppose there's anything stopping the government from shutting down those portions of the roads that are straight and free of obstructions to use as airstrips in an emergency. But there is no such thing as the "one-mile-in-five" law your friend mentioned.
DennyK