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!
https://airfields-freeman.com/CA/Airfields_CA_SanBernardino_...
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.
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.
The future looks much like it does now.
(Side note to those who might know: beyond Juhu Aerodrome, does anyone know of any other such small airfields nearby?
I love the Crissy Field section, considering what it is now and how recently it was being used.
https://airfields-freeman.com/CA/Airfields_CA_SanFran.htm#cr...
* 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.
Research paper for anyone interested: https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/airport-nois...
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
> 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.
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.
Apparently the main motivation was to have a legacy...
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.
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.
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!