Where Have All the Airports Gone?

Sometime back in the 1970s, I read an article with a title very close to Where Have All the Airports Gone? I wish I could remember where I saw it, or who wrote it, because the title stayed with me for decades. I was young enough then that airport closures still felt like something that belonged to a distant future. The idea of looking around someday and finding fewer and fewer places to fly seemed almost abstract.

It does not feel abstract anymore.

Over the past twenty or thirty years, I have watched airports disappear. Sometimes the reason is simple. The land becomes more valuable for something else. Housing. Commercial development. Warehouses. Roads. Another use that can be measured in dollars per acre more easily than the value of a runway, a row of hangars, or a place where someone can spend an afternoon flying simply because they love to fly.

I understand the economics of it. Cities grow. Land changes. Property becomes valuable. Decisions have to be made. But if you have spent much of your life around airplanes, it is hard to look at an airport as just another parcel of land waiting for a better use.

That 3,000 feet of runway is not just pavement.

It is where someone first learned to hold centerline. It is where someone heard “your airplane” for the first time. It is where a student made a first solo and probably remembers every second of it. It is where an old airplane came back after an hour in the pattern and somebody sat in the cockpit for another few minutes before climbing out because they were not quite ready for the flight to be over.

There are hangars with projects that took years to build. There are airplanes that have changed hands three times but still sit in the same corner of the same building. There are pilots who know exactly which crack in the pavement means they are almost at their turnoff. There are people standing at the fence who may be seeing an airplane up close for the first time.

Those things do not show up very well in a land-value calculation.

Once an airport closes, we usually do a decent job of saving pieces of it. Somebody has photographs. Somebody has an old sectional chart. There may be an airport directory in a drawer. Maybe somebody saved a sign or a windsock. Satellite imagery will still show what was there for a while.

But the airport itself is gone.

And that is the part I have been thinking about lately.

We have the ability now to document these places in a way that simply was not practical when I first read that article. A modern aerial mapping aircraft can capture the entire field in extraordinary detail. The runway. Taxiways. Hangars. Ramp. Drainage. Roads. Terrain. Surrounding development. The way everything fits together.

Not as a handful of photographs.

As a complete spatial record of the place.

That matters to me because an airport is more than the individual pieces. The real character of a field is in the relationship between them. The runway sitting in the valley. The hangars tucked against one side. The road crossing near the approach end. The houses that slowly crept closer over the years. The open land beyond the departure end that once seemed like it would always stay open.

A three-dimensional model or detailed orthomosaic cannot preserve the smell of a hangar on a summer afternoon. It cannot preserve the sound of an engine starting on the ramp. It cannot preserve the feeling of turning final and seeing that familiar strip of pavement waiting for you.

But it can preserve the place.

And sometimes that is more than we have done before.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether some of these airports ought to be documented while they are still alive. Not because they are scheduled to close next month. By then, the important decisions may already have been made. I mean while they are still operating normally. While airplanes are still tied down on the ramp. While the runway markings are still being maintained. While somebody still drives out to open the hangar on a Saturday morning with nowhere in particular they need to go.

If the airport is still there fifty years from now, that record becomes part of its history.

If it is not, then at least something more substantial remains than a few scattered pictures and somebody saying, “There used to be an airport here.”

That may be what has stayed with me from that article all these years. I do not think it was simply warning that airports might disappear. It made me imagine what it would feel like to realize that something I had always assumed would be there had quietly vanished.

I am beginning to understand that feeling now.

We tend to document things after we realize they are important. After the building is torn down. After the landscape changes. After the runway is removed. After the airport closes.

That is backwards.

The time to preserve a place is while it is still ordinary.

While nobody thinks it is going anywhere.

While you can still stand at the end of that 3,000-foot runway, look down its length, and know exactly what it is for.

Maybe the question is not Where have all the airports gone?

Maybe the better question is: Which ones are still here, and what are we going to preserve before they are gone?

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