I just spent a wonderful hour learning about the hidden history of aviation near where I grew up. This site is clearly a labor of love and there is a lot of history here.
Something I've wondered about for a while: If you get on the King County Parcel Viewer site and select the 1936 aerial photo basemap, you can get a good resolution view of the Seattle area from that time. If you look at Fort Lawton (now Discovery Park) there's a conspicuous east-west strip that looks like a primitive airfield. It's not listed on the historical airports site, and from digging around on Google books I think I saw it talked about as a rifle range, but I also saw a reference to it as a place where a plane could land in an emergency. Anyway, it makes me wonder if the government could have been doing early aviation work there and just kept it classified. (Or maybe it was just a very long rifle range...)
Well thank you! I never knew I needed this but I seem to have a hidden desire to read & view all these abandoned / retired airfields in the country surrounding me. I will even try to visit some.
I was about to ask for that in the comments section, thanks! Unfortunately my country (Romania) seems not to be on the list but maybe one will find a way to contribute to that list.
Talking about Romania and airfields, I think that information (the location of the airfields) was some State secret for a long time. There are some military topographical maps (mostly from the 1970s) where not one airfield or airport is shown [1]. Otherwise those maps are full of other very interesting details (like the location of mineral resources). For example if one zooms in to the Northern area of Bucharest where its two airports are located there's nothing on those maps.
A little disappointed not to find Llandow, the WWII airfield I grew up near in South Wales. After the war its great open streaches of runway became the focus of much unofficial (then later offical) motorsport. Traders and scrap merchants took over the hangers and it grew into a trading estate. It turned from a patch of open farmland into a shabby, noisy but interesting place.
A lot of postwar development in the UK has been clustered around disused WWII bases. There are several government research/nuclear establishments, and numerous industrial and commercial sites. Several airfields have also been converted to solar farms now.
I think this has been positive as a way of unlocking land for things that need space. So much of England is "precious" both in terms of value and how it is protected. Having a place to build and rebuild grotty factory units is very helpful.
I live near a site that started as an arm's depot. About twenty years ago it started to be leased as small units to startups. Many biotech spin-off companies that needed adaptable space moved in. Now it is full of large biotech labs and distribution centers. Soon there will be large data centres. There are a couple of nuclear research sites on old airfields close by which also host a space cluster.
I love these older style websites that clearly are someone's passion and contain a lot of niche information without all the cruft of modern sites. It's one of the inspirations for why I host my own blog and keep it quite light resource wise. It would bring me joy to be able to help others with information that I've written on the blog so I don't want it to be at the mercy of a social network or corporation. I was just contacted by a person doing a similar thing I had written about on my blog and they asked if they could contact me later with questions if they run into problems. It really made my day, knowing that something I did had meaning for others.
Of course, at some point the author of the website (like me) will move on to other things or get too old to run it, and what happens then? I hope the Internet Archive can handle it, but I fear there's too much to store. But I guess that's just how these things have always gone, no matter if it's a website or a book or a collection, there's just too many things in the world to store them all forever.
But I digress. I just want to raise my hat to you who runs one of these websites, filling it with information on whatever your passion is, for others to enjoy and learn from. I think it's a meaningful gesture and I hope you get as much out of it as the anonymous readers do.
Mirroring an entire website is trivial, but the concept of continuing one on afterwards seems a world away from regular open source efforts where it's a daily occurrence.
I'd be interested in how many sites were "forks" of an original, doubt there's many at all apart from SEO spam?
Sites like this are typically squirreled away on the Internet Archive someplace. The issue is discoverability. It's probably fair to say that just because something is stored there, absent links to it from active sites, almost no one will find it.
Are there any other passion, old style, useful sites that you know of? I remember coming across two on HN - one on trains, train schedules etc and another on plants (I believe this one was by a couple). Unfortunately I didn't bookmark either of those, I don't remember the URLs anymore :(
It's mostly in Finnish but has some English pages as well. It's a treasure trove of various information, and especially good information on Finnish grammar, I've used it often to find out the answers some more obscure grammar questions.
> When I fly as a pilot myself, I've always tried to land at as many airports as possible, to learn a little about each one.
Oh I loved this during my training and hour building as well, pick a small airfield at random within a 1 to 2 hours flying from home and go there just to see it. It's amazing how many small airports have good food and friendly people to tell you something about the area.
And then later had a similar game for a while when I got my instrument rating: Pick a random airport and see what kind of interesting approach procedure they have. ATC had some funny reactions when you ask for the "full procedure NDB/DME" instead of vectors to the ILS, because everybody hates NDB approaches and nobody wants to fly a full procedure if a shortcut is available. Except for those that just need hours and like a challenge :-)
I'm not a pilot, but a favorite of mine is Blueberry Hill in western MA. It's perhaps a quarter mile from the Appalachian Trail, and it's also a pick your own blueberry farm! I came through in blueberry season in 2010, and delighted in picking and eating 1.5 pounds of blueberries (metric conversion: far too much for a single serving). Surprisingly: no repercussions. Lovely owners, and fun to talk to.
The wind took a plastic bag from me as I was rejiggering gear, and I had to chase it the length of the runway to get it back.
One not really unforgotten but definitely little known is Wisley Airfield [0], right beside the A3 heading into London. Came across it one day on a long bicycle trip, while I suddenly found myself in the middle of a mile-long runway. There are footpaths and a bridleway across it, so it's easily accessible. It also has the interesting feature of armco strips across it, which I think are to stop people from using it for impromptu drag races.
I have been reading some books by Peter Hopkirk, an amateur historian covering The Great Game[0], and what's amazing to me from reading his books is how much effort it took to get even basic knowledge of the geography of Central Asia (I'm sure it was similar in other parts of the world). Things that we now would find trivial due to airplanes and satellite imagery required years of exploration and time-consuming, detailed surveying took years of effort by men who're basically unknown today.
You don't have to get too far off the beaten path to hit material that's only even mentioned in books, and you'd never even know exists if you only used the Web. The Web is pretty damn shallow for, especially, history and social science, in my experience. It's great if you want to look up math stuff, I guess.
For social science it seems fastest way to get into a topic is just use the Web to find one decent, recent book on the topic, get it, then write down all the books & sources that book name-drops in its introduction as important or notable, and go get them. College course syllabi can also be useful if you're really starting from scratch (especially for finding that first book). If you try to stick with the Web you'll just spin your wheels.
The line between digitized / non-digitized has always fascinated me, because it seems completely arbitrary.
Obviously if something is worth money, someone probably went to the trouble of digitizing it.
Which probably explains why art (the general bulk, not famous), history, and social sciences are so poorly represented, because their value is more abstract or in aggregate.
I have a low-grade hobby of scanning around in Google Maps looking for old airfields in the UK. Pretty easy to spot when you know what patterns to look for, even when they've been ploughed under and are a wheat field now.
We had a guy show up an EAA meeting about 10 years ago. He was making maps of all the private air strips in our state. These are not on the regular charts but most of the their owners understood that in an emergency it would be nice to intrude on a private strip rather than intruding on a cornfield or worse.
If you're in the bay area, the Redwood City airport was near what is now the 101/Woodside Road interchange; the section of Woodside Road between El Camino and 101 wasn't built until the late 1950s. The airport's runway ran from the Redwood City municipal yard, across Woodside Road, through the post office, towards Summit High School. The offices were roughly near the Denny's.
This website is awesome and has been around for more than 20 years. I know because we once used this in college to find a cool place to go hang out!
Back when I was a student at Auburn University (southern Alabama, USA) in the early 2000s, some friends and I went up to check out the abandoned airport in Camp Hill, Alabama [0], about a half-hour out of town. It was super creepy at night.
It felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. It was unguarded and there was no fences or anything. We parked along a treeline that shielded our car from the road in case anyone came by. There was a door on the side of the hanger that was unlocked. We poked around inside for a little bit; apparently the city was using the old hanger as a storage barn for trucks and stuff. There were still all kinds of old neat aviation stuff in a small office inside the hanger (old runway signs, charts, etc).
Took a walk up and down the old runway. We didn't use flashlights on the runway because we didn't want to be noticed, but the moon was enough illumination that night. Walking on a runway completely surrounded by these enormously tall southern pine trees, dead silent, with just moonlight was one of the more surreal experiences of my life.
A few months or so later we went back up there because it turned out that it was a really, really good place to watch the big Leonid meteor shower in 2001 [1]. You were pretty far from any town and the tall trees gave it extra darkness. We threw blankets down on the runway and just chilled with some drinks and watched the show.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the state cut the new US-280 bypass across the back part of the old runway [2], so you can't really have that experience anymore. Still, it remains one of my favorite college memories.
Old party spots deserve national historic registration.
Now gone spots from my wayward youth included an abandoned bridge over the interstate, garden ruins bordering a prison, a railroad signal bridge and the concrete roof of an isolated watershed monitoring bunker.
Great little site! Having been in aviation for a while I was looking for some of the grass runway airports I'd visited in the past. My goal is to revisit them all, but this time in MS Flight Simulator. :)
Will be making a donation, my only gripe is that there is no search, either by name or zip code (or sectional map?), so it was not easy to find everything I was looking for
I love this type of Internet info ~ browsing through the site, an old airstrip is now a lumber yard where I purchased some wood for a shed in my backyard, and can see from my monitor: https://ibb.co/HrCny1M
My tiny bit of nerdery around little-known airfields stems from being fascinated by the names and airport code of my city's main airport. What today is called the Louisville Muhammed Ali International Airport has the code SDF and I find it fun to explain why that is and why the code doesn't seem to have anything to do with the name or the city. The airport was originally named "Standiford Field" named after a previous city mayor. It couldn't use the LOU code that better resembles the city name because it was already in use, by the city's other airfield, Bowman Field. (A WW1 era field, IIRC.)
Bowman Field is not "little-known" enough to qualify for this website's criteria, but still a fascinating tiny airfield. Today it is now the oldest, continuously operating airfield in the country. Interestingly some of the nearly as old or slightly older airfields still operating today stopped operating only for the bare minimum time (at least a year) needed to switch airport codes with a larger, newer airport. At this point it's almost a point of civic pride that our largest airport has one of the most confusing airport codes, simply because the city didn't want to shut down a good old airfield still doing its job with smaller aircraft.
(In the recent Muhammed Ali rebrand the city did briefly look into a code change, but even if ALI had been available, which a small Texas airfield uses today, UPS probably would not have been happy if they actually tried to change it.)
(It's also fun to explain why SDF is an "International Airport" that almost never has international passenger flights. SDF is also home to UPS' "WorldPort" and is the central hub for the majority of UPS Air flights, so has tons of international cargo flights every day. If you get a package from UPS and it travelled by air, it probably passed through SDF.)
40 comments
[ 703 ms ] story [ 1514 ms ] threadTalking about Romania and airfields, I think that information (the location of the airfields) was some State secret for a long time. There are some military topographical maps (mostly from the 1970s) where not one airfield or airport is shown [1]. Otherwise those maps are full of other very interesting details (like the location of mineral resources). For example if one zooms in to the Northern area of Bucharest where its two airports are located there's nothing on those maps.
[1] https://portal.geomil.ro/portal/home/webmap/viewer.html?webm...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=llandow+&ia=images&iax=imag...
For example, Greenham Common is not listed[1], and I guess it's up to the users to submit it!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Greenham_Common
I think this has been positive as a way of unlocking land for things that need space. So much of England is "precious" both in terms of value and how it is protected. Having a place to build and rebuild grotty factory units is very helpful.
I live near a site that started as an arm's depot. About twenty years ago it started to be leased as small units to startups. Many biotech spin-off companies that needed adaptable space moved in. Now it is full of large biotech labs and distribution centers. Soon there will be large data centres. There are a couple of nuclear research sites on old airfields close by which also host a space cluster.
"In 2017 a flight over the former airbase showed it had suffered the same faith as many other European air bases: it had become a solar powerplant"
made me laugh.
Of course, at some point the author of the website (like me) will move on to other things or get too old to run it, and what happens then? I hope the Internet Archive can handle it, but I fear there's too much to store. But I guess that's just how these things have always gone, no matter if it's a website or a book or a collection, there's just too many things in the world to store them all forever.
But I digress. I just want to raise my hat to you who runs one of these websites, filling it with information on whatever your passion is, for others to enjoy and learn from. I think it's a meaningful gesture and I hope you get as much out of it as the anonymous readers do.
I'd be interested in how many sites were "forks" of an original, doubt there's many at all apart from SEO spam?
It's mostly in Finnish but has some English pages as well. It's a treasure trove of various information, and especially good information on Finnish grammar, I've used it often to find out the answers some more obscure grammar questions.
Oh I loved this during my training and hour building as well, pick a small airfield at random within a 1 to 2 hours flying from home and go there just to see it. It's amazing how many small airports have good food and friendly people to tell you something about the area.
And then later had a similar game for a while when I got my instrument rating: Pick a random airport and see what kind of interesting approach procedure they have. ATC had some funny reactions when you ask for the "full procedure NDB/DME" instead of vectors to the ILS, because everybody hates NDB approaches and nobody wants to fly a full procedure if a shortcut is available. Except for those that just need hours and like a challenge :-)
The wind took a plastic bag from me as I was rejiggering gear, and I had to chase it the length of the runway to get it back.
https://www.airnav.com/airport/MA77
[0] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Wisley,+Woking/@51.30916...
Who else does this, except for perhaps exceptionally obsessive CIA analysts?
I tip my hat to you, sir.
http://airfields-freeman.com/NY/Airfields_NY_Buffalo.htm
In college, I built a military model of the French Weygand Line in June 1940. There was very little digital map data as of that date.
A trip to the library, and I was able to find a high-resolution map, including larger buildings and vegetation in towns.
Which makes sense, because maps were more or less the pre-Internet Internet of synthesized data.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
I think that's the fundamental shift that the writing, and then the printing press and then global information networks, produced.
Suddenly the ratio of time_to_share : time_to_discover was permanently decreased, to the benefit of all of humanity.
Contrast with an oral tradition, transmitted via apprenticeship.
For social science it seems fastest way to get into a topic is just use the Web to find one decent, recent book on the topic, get it, then write down all the books & sources that book name-drops in its introduction as important or notable, and go get them. College course syllabi can also be useful if you're really starting from scratch (especially for finding that first book). If you try to stick with the Web you'll just spin your wheels.
Obviously if something is worth money, someone probably went to the trouble of digitizing it.
Which probably explains why art (the general bulk, not famous), history, and social sciences are so poorly represented, because their value is more abstract or in aggregate.
Maybe I'll move my 3am hobby up a notch and start posting or contributing to forgottenairfields.
Back when I was a student at Auburn University (southern Alabama, USA) in the early 2000s, some friends and I went up to check out the abandoned airport in Camp Hill, Alabama [0], about a half-hour out of town. It was super creepy at night.
It felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. It was unguarded and there was no fences or anything. We parked along a treeline that shielded our car from the road in case anyone came by. There was a door on the side of the hanger that was unlocked. We poked around inside for a little bit; apparently the city was using the old hanger as a storage barn for trucks and stuff. There were still all kinds of old neat aviation stuff in a small office inside the hanger (old runway signs, charts, etc).
Took a walk up and down the old runway. We didn't use flashlights on the runway because we didn't want to be noticed, but the moon was enough illumination that night. Walking on a runway completely surrounded by these enormously tall southern pine trees, dead silent, with just moonlight was one of the more surreal experiences of my life.
A few months or so later we went back up there because it turned out that it was a really, really good place to watch the big Leonid meteor shower in 2001 [1]. You were pretty far from any town and the tall trees gave it extra darkness. We threw blankets down on the runway and just chilled with some drinks and watched the show.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter the state cut the new US-280 bypass across the back part of the old runway [2], so you can't really have that experience anymore. Still, it remains one of my favorite college memories.
[0] http://www.airfields-freeman.com/AL/Airfields_AL_Birmingham....
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/11/16/meteor.showers/ind...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Camp+Hill-Tallapoosa+Count...
Now gone spots from my wayward youth included an abandoned bridge over the interstate, garden ruins bordering a prison, a railroad signal bridge and the concrete roof of an isolated watershed monitoring bunker.
Will be making a donation, my only gripe is that there is no search, either by name or zip code (or sectional map?), so it was not easy to find everything I was looking for
The site seems to focus on forgotten, decommissioned airports - which is awesome in it's own right.
Bowman Field is not "little-known" enough to qualify for this website's criteria, but still a fascinating tiny airfield. Today it is now the oldest, continuously operating airfield in the country. Interestingly some of the nearly as old or slightly older airfields still operating today stopped operating only for the bare minimum time (at least a year) needed to switch airport codes with a larger, newer airport. At this point it's almost a point of civic pride that our largest airport has one of the most confusing airport codes, simply because the city didn't want to shut down a good old airfield still doing its job with smaller aircraft.
(In the recent Muhammed Ali rebrand the city did briefly look into a code change, but even if ALI had been available, which a small Texas airfield uses today, UPS probably would not have been happy if they actually tried to change it.)
(It's also fun to explain why SDF is an "International Airport" that almost never has international passenger flights. SDF is also home to UPS' "WorldPort" and is the central hub for the majority of UPS Air flights, so has tons of international cargo flights every day. If you get a package from UPS and it travelled by air, it probably passed through SDF.)
Anyway, nerdy airfield facts.