Abandoned U.S. Airfields Documented

Very cool......

 

Rob, I found that site several years ago and should have mentioned it earlier. I found all of the fields that I flew out of our hung out at around Washington, D.C. and the airports in Florida. I rechecked Sarasota ( Johnny Lowe's ) and was jolted to see a quote attributed to me below the field's history description. Don't know how that happened but that is where I spent a lot of timeflying and visiting the circus people across the road. All of it is under houses and golf courses now.
SWICHES

 

Oh yeah, I love that site! I live right around the corner from old Monogram field in Driver, which is part of Suffolk, Va (check it out on the site). Just as in the pictures on the site, you can still see the old runways and where the practice catapult was. Rumor has it there is a wrecked Avenger or something similar in the marsh around here, but I've flown over a few times haven't been able to spot it yet. Maybe I can pull it out and refurbish it and live out my fantasy of owning one.

 

i was able to find all the airports that I frequented when I was a little airport bum begging rides or watching airplanes in the thirty's. Congressional in Rockville, Md. where I got my first flight in an Aeronca C3, Hybla Valley, Hyattsville, College Park, Washington's Hoover Field, Bolling Field, Anacostia Naval Air Station, and then Lowe's Field in Sarasota, Ft. Meyers, St. Pete, Sarasota-bradenton, Plant City,Arcadia, Punta Gorda, and on and on.
SWITCHES

 

Rob....

That is a cool site........been on it for a year or two on.......when combined with GOOGLE Earth it makes for an interesting few hours.

 

Very cool indeed. I was interested to learn that I now work in a building that is sitting on top of the old Highland Park Airport site in North Dallas at the SW corner of 635 and 75. This is now TI's "Park Central" location.

 

I've run across that site before, but I just fell into another hole for an hour (Thanks Rob!). Funny thing is, I found two more I didn't know about.

 

http://www.airfields-freeman.com/KS/Airfields_KS_E.htm

My house I just sold is in the neighborhood to the north and my office is two blocks to the west on 135th street. People had talked about an old airport, but I never new that I passed it two times a day and never new it. Thanks for the initial post Rob.

 

Good link. It was revealing what has happened to the Grumman airport since I left Long Island.....

 

Did you ever fly a rented Areonca 7AC out of Lowe's? If so you might have flown our Champ. To the best of my knowledge, someone ran it out of gas and crashed sometime in the 50's. At some point it was moved to the new Lowe's field off of Fruitville Road and stored in a barn of sorts until it's restoration in 1988. I do not have the logs handy, but I think the original tail number was NC85171

When I was flight Instructing in Venice, FL around 1989 a new student showed up and when I looked over his log, I saw he had soloed my champ out of Johnny Lowe's. Naturally, after his leson in the 150, we went and flew the champ.
Dave

 

Good read! I never knew the Ventura "keys" used to be an airfield. The owner sold the dirt to the feds to build a freeway, and a marina was created with the hole left over. Wow!

 

I left Florida in 1949 to go to work at Boeing so I wasn't there when the Camp had its incident. I did fly many Champs out there and at the Sarasota-Bradenton airport where I worked for 4 years during summer vacations. I have no idea where my log book is but when I find it I'll see if that N-number is in it...I wasn't very good at entering everything I flew. I flew something and went on to the next one.
Thanks for posting.
SWITCHES

 

I never knew about GSW, which sat at what is now the SE corner of 360 & 183 in Fort Worth/Grand Prairie/Arlington/Irving, TX. It also explains why that corner of the world is technically considered city of Fort Worth.

I've driven by it all my life and never knew that there was a major airport there.

 

http://www.airfields-freeman.com/FL/Airfields_FL_OrlandoSW.htm#disney

We went to Disney last week for Spring Break. It was also my daughter Lindsey's 7th birthday. For birthdays they let you ride with the driver on the monorail. I asked him about the runway and he pointed it out. He said Michael Eisner flew in there when he was running Disney. He pointed out the storage containers and trailers parked there now. I'm not a pilot but it looked like a serviceable runway, still.

 

I have a serious collection of old USAF Fighter Squadron cloth patches, from the 1950's. The original patches are very difficult to locate. The hand-made chenille fighter squadron patches from the early 50's, are works of art.

It touches me, when I drive on Highway 59 south, just outside of Victoria, Texas, and see the old aircraft hangers from Foster AFB. Foster in the mid 1950's, used to host two day fighter wings, that had at different times silver F-86F's and F-100C's. If I could just have an hour, to collect the original patches from the six different fighter day squadrons on base !! I know the squadron designations and what the patches look like. ...damn.