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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."
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please report to camp X-Ray for de-briefing.
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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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
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.
"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).
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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
"OK Kids, off the playground, a plane's about to land" ??
What would Brian Boitano do?
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"
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.
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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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
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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.
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