I'm glad this site is still up as I haven't looked at it in many years. I used to be based out of W32, Hyde Field and got out during the sale/bankruptcy a few years ago. The recent photos of the place there do a good job capturing the scene of decay. It had essentially no online presence, but there was an active and very good aircraft maintenance shop there until the end. https://airfields-freeman.com/MD/Airfields_MD_PG_S.htm
The stories he would tell of that place. Drug runners landing in the night and him chasing them off with a shotgun. People constantly coming around to try and steal things. The people that would fly in to say hello. He had a real community out there. There were some sad circumstances around the end of his life that meant he couldn't run it the way it should have been run and it fell into decay. My family sold it after his passing as the cost and complexity to run such an airport so far from everything was too much (on top of none of us being pilots). It was a sad event. These days I think it's a solar farm.
I landed at that airport, it must have been soon after your grandfather passed - it wasn't NOTAM'd as closed, but the phone number had a recording that the owner had passed and it was closed - I relocated to the larger 29 Palms airport, farther from my destination. My condolences on your loss.
It's too bad, because once these small GA airports go away, they are never coming back. Too expensive to rehab, and nobody is building new ones anymore. So ideally they should be preserved, but nobody wants to do it.
The tiny GA airfield in my home town went up for sale some time back, and the price they were asking was less than what a medium-sized Bay Area home cost. I was so tempted to find a way to make it work (equity partner?) and retire my tech job to become an airport manager. But alas, I chickened out, and some doofus bought it and is probably going to destroy it to build something stupid there. Unlikely it will remain an airport, and unlikely it will ever be sold again as a feasible rehab project.
Yeah, that's the problem: once they close down and the land gets sold, it will typically get developed and once that happens the land isn't coming back unless you have a Detroit situation. It's not like suburbs have lots of empty space for an approach and a strip. Even if there were, NIMBYs would prevent one from happening.
Small GA airports out in the middle of nowhere can come into being, but it's rare, and the whole GA field is aging out and disappearing (both the pilots, planes, and people).
What are the criteria for inclusion on this site? In no particular order I have a couple that could be added:
Plymouth Municipal in Plymouth, NH. GA grass strip, I believe. Follow the signs towards Quincy Bog from 93. If you go through a covered bridge shortly after turning off 25, you're on the right road.
Blueberry Hill in Western MA. Private grass strip. Former(?) home of The Cookie Lady. PYO Blueberries. About 10 miles north of Upper Goose Pond cabin on the Appalachian Trail. Northbound hikers will appreciate it greatly if southbound hikers bring blueberries for the pancakes the next morning.
Post Mills, VT. Grass strip, has very active soaring and ballooning communities. Home to the Vermontasaurus and a great deal of other folk art-type stuff. Worth a trip if you're in our particular middle of nowhere already. No, I did not know Brian Boland. He died before we moved to the area.
Tonopah, NV is on there. I spent a night with my tent pitched in their hangar (with permission) in 2006 bike touring out west. That one remains active.
Post Mills is most definitely active and they release sailplane tows over our house regularly. Often you can find someone setting up for a baloon flight on a nice morning. I've driven by Plymouth Municipal a bunch going to and from Rumney for climbing when I lived in Boston, and there were a bunch of planes last time I did that. Haven't been by Blueberry Hill in a while, but sure was happy to gorge myself on blueberries on my way to Katahdin in 2010!
I love the concept and upvoted but I really wish there was a [USA] tag. I'm on the other side of the world and I clicked, wondering if there are any airfields near where I live. I am still wondering.
(Side note to those who might know: beyond Juhu Aerodrome, does anyone know of any other such small airfields nearby?
It’s a poignant phenomenon that so many airfields used to exist. People now complain endlessly to get long-established fields shut down *, but red tape keeps any new ones from opening.
* It is important to note that usually, something like 98% of noise complaints come from 1-2 individuals, even in areas with thousands of residents.
And when there's any talk about airport capacity expansion, newspapers and anti-development organizations trot out statistics about thousands of complaints per year from residents, and then the conversation shifts from expansion to reduction. sigh
I mean I kind of get that. If I bought land/house away from stuff, and suddenly they want to place an airfield right next to me, I'd fight it as well. Moving to where an airfield already is and then try to close it is mischievous behaviour though, and obviously not very kind.
> 98% of noise complaints come from 1-2 individuals, even in areas with thousands of residents.
I think you can replace "noise" with "X" and it still applies to almost everything. People generally just adapt and is fine with pretty much anything not directly impacting your life, in many places.
This is true, but the problem has become more concentrated with the advent of RNAV. Depending on wind direction and which runway Logan was operating, I had flights departing directly over my place in both JP and later Somerville every 60-90 seconds. The precision with which they do this is incredible, and also kind of annoying.
Spreading out the traffic would do wonders. Having witnessed this firsthand, it's not super surprising that complaints are concentrated when the noise is too.
I discovered this website in the mid-2000s when I was obsessing over the history of a former airfield (Stengel Airport). This site combined with Google Earth got me hooked on aerial photography (also worthy of mention- USGS EarthExplorer, and FDOT APLUS). Very glad to see the site mentioned.
I've used this website to add a bunch of additional airfields in my (non-commercial, personal/hobby) flight sim that has procedurally generated runways, in the bay area specifically, so guy if you're reading this, thanks! Adds a lot of additional color to my sim flying experience.
I grew up near an abandoned WWII era airfield. I have fond memories of first learning to drive by going out and blasting along the runway, had to avoid a few spots where trees had grown up through cracks in the tarmac, but it didn't matter if I stalled out the truck and I could get it up to a good speed.
I read about the clandestine midnight destruction of Meigs Field, Chicago - somehow the first one I happened upon. The mayor had the runway bulldozed in the night so that no one could have time to object. Unbelievable and mildly infuriating story.
Apparently the main motivation was to have a legacy...
England also has a lot of disused airfields, often with huge hangers and stupendous concrete runways built during WWII. A few are open as museums. They can be worth a quick visit.
My family used to farm a chunk of land in Lincolnshire, UK. Many of our farms were on or surrounded by active or decommissioned RAF bases.
I learnt to drive on the unused tarmac at one of those old bases, RAF Wickenby. As the parent poster mentioned, many of the bases are worth a visit and Wickenby in particular has a memorial to airmen lost in the world wars.
Dunholme Lodge was defunct RAF base near the then active V-bomber base RAF Scampton. It was a favourite place for us RAF kids to explore - the concrete of the torn up runway provided all sorts of caves, and there was a deserted multi-storey control tower, which was quite frightening when the winds were blowing. This would have been the early 1960s - I think it is all farmland or new-build housing now.
That was on a neighbouring farm to one of ours. It’s just a bit of concrete in the middle of their fields now. You possibly got shouted at by my famously grumpy grandad.
I both love and hate the 90s web design of the page. Looking through my local area (Chicago near-west suburbs), it appears to be missing two airfields that used to be nearby: Cicero Field (which is mentioned but not listed) and another one that used to be in Forest Park (which is not even mentioned).
I didn’t know about the field that used to be in La Grange, whose location is now a gravel pit (which, combined with another one on the other side of Joliet Road is responsible for the closure of a stretch of historic Route 66 although the gravel pit operators insist that despite quarrying to within a dozen feet of the roadway on either side, they aren’t responsible for the subsistence of the road.
I'm right there with you. These used to be the types of site designs and layouts we didn't want "back in the day" but loading them up these days is like a breath of fresh air, like the old geocities, xoom, etc sites.
Even inspecting the source and seeing HTML 4.0 Transitional, the capitalized tags, the bunch of duplicated meta tags and openoffice as generator no longer gives me the creeps as it would a while ago.
It's a labor of love and only the content matters, everything else is irrelevant! Never change, we do need more of these!
It's a shame we don't have a better solution than the Internet Archive for preserving these after the creator is gone (or loses interest), but thank goodness we do have that. So many gems lost to time otherwise.