In 1935, Henry "Pete" Griffing mingled freely with the aviation elite of Philadelphia. As a 14-year-old dishwasher at The Philadelphia Aviation Country Club located on Wings Field, he scraped the plates of well-known early aviators and philanthropists with names such as Pew, Wanamaker, Wolf, Smith, Ludington, Sharples, and Pitcairn, to name a few. You never knew who might stop by for lunch: Wright, Godfrey, Earhart, or Lindbergh. But you knew it would be interesting.
Two years later, Griffing had worked his way up to lineboy, fueling airplanes and assisting passengers and pilots. In those days, the airport had three crisscrossing grass runways. The original farmhouse had been converted to the country club.
Griffing learned to fly at Wings, and, after returning from World War II, he became an aircraft salesman there. A chance meeting with a pretty young woman named Joanne changed his life forever.
Joanne was processing paperwork at the field for ex-military personnel using their GI Bill funds for flight training. Despite her day-to-day interactions with the pilots and airplanes, she had never been flying. "I'm the girl who when I started at Wings they sent out with a bucket to get some prop wash," she sheepishly confesses. "They're still laughing."
It didn't seem right to Griffing that a girl working at the airport hadn't ever been flying. He plunked her into the front seat of a Piper J-3 Cub and fixed that. They were married four years later in 1950, the same year that Griffing's Marine Corps reserve unit was reactivated for Korea.
Pete and Joanne had a long career together in aircraft sales and still operate Griffing Associates, an aircraft sales company, all these years later. They are just two of literally hundreds of lives that have been impacted by that magnificent chunk of real estate located just 30 minutes from downtown Philadelphia.
John Story Smith purchased a farm and opened Wings Field in 1929, and, despite the Depression, it quickly became the place to be for Philadelphia socialites. Ten years later, seeing general aviation negatively affected by national defense concerns as Germany's threat stretched across the ocean, Smith and a group of the country club members got together in a room in that very clubhouse and signed the papers creating the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. The AOPA board of trustees still holds its annual meeting in that room each year on the first Saturday in May.
After Smith died, Henry S. McNeil and real estate developer Robert J. Fox bought the property with the intent of keeping it as an airport. You may recognize McNeil's name. It is his family that started McNeil Laboratories, makers of Tylenol, Motrin, and other medications. The company is headquartered only five minutes from Wings Field and Henry wanted the airport to remain open for his own purposes, if nothing else. He kept a Beech King Air and other airplanes at the field and enjoyed the convenience that Wings provided.
Eventually Henry bought out Fox and owned the airport in its entirety. Though privately owned, the field has always been a public-use facility. When Henry died in 1985, the 2,600-foot paved runway and the rest of the property passed to his estate and was administered by his heirs through the Claneil Corporation. Respecting Henry's wishes, the heirs wanted the property maintained as an airport and as 217 acres of open space in what had by then become densely developed suburban Philadelphia.
Like every airport, particularly ones located in urban and suburban areas, Wings Field faced challenges. The new neighbors in their million-dollar homes didn't like the noise generated by the airplanes. And despite Wings' excellent safety record the locals feared airplanes plummeting from the sky into their schools, homes, and churches. The highly organized opponents persuaded township officials to prohibit improvements or expansion of the field.
Even politicians at the state level were persuaded to write legislation nearly specific to Wings that prohibited government funding of improvements at the field without the support of township officials. The legislation choked off even federal funds for Wings. Most privately owned airports are not eligible for federal funds, but being a designated reliever for Philadelphia International, Wings could have received money from the FAA. However, Pennsylvania is one of only nine states where FAA and other federal funds are doled out by the state under what's known as the state block grant program. Therefore, with the aid of the legislation, the state could stop funding from flowing to Wings. The 2,600-foot humped and deteriorating runway needed to be rebuilt and extended if the airport was going to survive in a modern world. Neighbors couldn't be convinced that a longer runway actually improved safety and lowered departure noise.
With the airport's future grim, the McNeil heirs decided they wanted to sell the property. Admirably they wanted to respect Henry's wishes that it remain as an airport. It didn't hurt that McNeil Laboratories still used the field for executive charter flights.
In June 1995, a representative of the McNeil family called a meeting with six prominent airport users. The heirs never revealed the details, but apparently an offer for the property from a developer was on the table. The pilots had 90 days to come up with a plan to buy the field.
Among the users at the meeting was Paul C. Heintz, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who has kept a Cessna 210 at the field for many years. He is also a member of the AOPA board of trustees and becomes chairman of the board this year.
Working with the others, Heintz furiously drafted a contract that outlined how the group would put down a $1 million deposit and then close the sale of the property within two years. If they missed the two-year deadline, they would forfeit $250,000. Meanwhile, the original $8 million price would escalate as time went by — up to $10 million at the end of the two years.
To help raise funds for the purchase, the group set up a Pennsylvania limited partnership called Wings Field Preservation Associates, L.P. The partnership's stated goal was to acquire the property, keep it as an airport, and improve it. But, Heintz notes, the intent was not to treat it as an ordinary investment or to emphasize the return from the investment. In fact, he admits, only rarely will any of the partners even receive any return.
About 40 individuals and corporations would comprise the partnership. Under the group's guidelines, none of the partners would have a say in the operation of the airport. Instead, that responsibility would be assumed by the corporate general partner controlled today by Heintz and two other longtime pilots, Dennis Daly and Robert Driscoll, D.O. The general partner would oversee the acquisition of and improvements to the airport, and it would also assume all of the liabilities associated with the ownership, shielding the rest of the group. Not interested in actually running the airport, the general partner vowed to contract with third parties to act as the FBO.
With the partnership structure set, the group set about raising funds — never an easy task. They first turned to nearby corporations who use the airport for helicopter and charter operations. Located within a five-minute drive are major facilities for Unisys, Aetna US Healthcare, and pharmaceuticals maker Merck & Company. Each of the corporations kicked in combinations of loans and grants totaling $6 million of the needed $10 million.
With $1 million raised under conventional funding, the group needed another $3 million to buy the field and another $1 million as working capital.
The airport tenants themselves seemed the next best bet. But getting money from pilots isn't always an easy task. Still, the partners had to ask, or in some cases, demand. Daly and Driscoll admit that some of the tactics weren't well received by the airport tenants, many of whom had their own ideas on how things should proceed. Basically, the group required individual owners operating aircraft valued at more than $200,000 to join the partnership and assessed them a fee for staying on the field. "If nobody paid up, we'd all be moving our airplanes somewhere else," reminds Driscoll, who is a partner in a Beech Bonanza at Wings. Those with lower-priced aircraft were asked to provide an interest-free $12,500 loan. Many did and some later converted the loans into shares in the partnership. Those who couldn't help weren't even asked. "We didn't want to drive all of our customers away because then where would we be?" asks Daly. "It was really a team effort of the pilots at Wings Field."
Still, neither Daly nor Driscoll is afraid to point out that many pilots based at the field who could well afford to chip in didn't. Some who did contribute are not even pilots or airport tenants. Instead, they are local citizens who want to see the site protected from development, preserving the open space.
Despite valiant efforts, the funding was not complete as the two-year deadline drew near. The McNeil family, knowing how hard the group was working and how close they were to meeting the funding goal, allowed multiple extensions. But finally, Claneil set a firm deadline of October 30, 1998.
October 29 dawned with the group still $1 million short of the goal. Literally the night before the scheduled closing, says Daly, a local bank provided another $1 million loan. "They processed the paperwork overnight and gave us a check."
And so, on October 30, 1998, the partnership purchased the property. It was a banner day for those involved in the complicated and lengthy process. "I want to give Claneil an enormous amount of credit," says Heintz. "The [McNeil] family wanted to sell, but they very much wanted it to stay as an airport and as open space. They gave us three years to put the deal together."
But the real estate closing was really just the beginning. The partners knew that the airport would not survive if it could not be improved. Aside from the occasional adventurous King Air, corporate traffic would never use the 2,600-foot runway. Hangars and taxiways needed repairs. But the local government still refused to allow funding.
Heintz, always the lawyer, knew the Pennsylvania law that prohibited the funding was unconstitutional. So, with the blessing of the partners, he filed suit against the state itself in Commonwealth Court. AOPA weighed in with a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the Wings petition to overturn the legislation. Left alone, the legislation could have been precedent-setting for other states.
Meanwhile, the Wings partners appealed directly to the FAA for funding, hoping to bypass the commonwealth's state block grant process. The FAA was reluctant to go behind the state's back. But personnel at the FAA's Harrisburg Airports District Office weighed in and took the Wings charge to Washington. Eventually, in April 2001, the FAA awarded $3.4 million in funding directly to the airport.
A month later, Commonwealth Court declared that the Pennsylvania statute violated both the state and the federal constitutions, striking the law from the books. With that change, the state too provided funding for the project, allowing the runway and taxiway improvement projects to proceed.
For Heintz, Driscoll, and Daly, the perfect close to this long and difficult chapter in Wings' history occurred last September when the airport hosted "Vintage Aircraft Day and Classic Car Show and Celebration of the New Runway-Taxiway at Wings Field." The public event attracted some 4,000 local residents. The affair coincided with the official opening of the new 3,700-foot runway and taxiway — a marked improvement over the old runway.
But, as with any airport, change occurs daily. Last fall, the board brought in a new fixed-base operator. Tim Schiller, president of Corporate Flight Concepts, says his FBO will maintain the small-operator, family atmosphere that Wings enjoyed in decades past before being managed by a large FBO company. With Schiller handling the airport's day-to-day operation, the partnership through Heintz, Driscoll, and Daly focuses on longer-term projects, such as the building of new hangars. Several hangars are in need of replacement and additional hangar space is needed. Nonetheless, the number of based aircraft is not expected to climb much above the current 100 airplanes. A new AWOS III is set to enter service this month. And, says Driscoll, the neighbors are complaining about the new airport beacon. The challenges go on.
While a few individuals obviously worked very hard to preserve this important airport — one of the oldest in the nation — Heintz is quick to point out that an army of people helped in one way or another. With their efforts, Wings Field is alive and well to serve a new generation of pilots and prospective pilots.
Who knows? This very weekend, the Pete and Joanne Griffing of the twenty-first century may bump into each other on the ramp, setting the stage for another lifetime together in aviation.
E-mail the author at [email protected].
How's your airport? AOPA has dozens of resources to help preserve and protect airports. In addition to its highly successful Airport Support Network, AOPA has videos, pamphlets, and other resources you will find useful at your airport. As the effort at Wings Field shows, every pilot can make a difference. For more detailed information, see AOPA Online ( www.aopa.org/asn/).
