Pilotage

Aviation writer Mark R. Twombly is the AOPA Airport Support Network volunteer for Page Field in Florida.

A logbook is a window on the past, which we can peer through to rekindle pleasant memories of interesting flights made and airports visited. Then there's Paul Freeman, who doesn't just peer through his window; he prefers to pry it open, climb through, and nose around. The past is where Freeman likes to hang out, and we're the better for it.

Freeman, who lives in Sterling, Virginia, and flies a Diamond Eclipse out of nearby Leesburg, has channeled his dual passions for aviation and history into an ambitious ongoing project that all of us can enjoy, admire, and learn from. He has created and maintains a Web site devoted to airports that no longer exist. The banner on the home page of the site says it all: "Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields."

The Web site was a consequence of two events in Freeman's life that roughly coincided — his learning to fly and the debut on the Internet of aerial photos, some decades old. Freeman calls these remarkably detailed photos the "God's-eye perspective."

The photos are one of the keys to identifying airports in the United States that no longer exist, and building a historical record of those airports. The other key is his ad hoc team, a core of about 10 regular correspondents — some pilots, some just aviation history buffs — who aid him in his research. With Freeman leading the charge, they have become adept at sleuthing out airfields ranging from unmarked sod strips to major multirunway civil and military complexes whose time, glory, and in many cases, memory have passed.

When Freeman is alerted to a candidate airport, he and his detectives go to work digging up old sectionals, photos, topographic maps, aerial photos, and books, and then they conduct interviews with people who were involved with the airport or who may know something about it. All of the information goes toward reviving the memory of a piece of land where aviation once thrived, where pilots practiced bounce and goes, sweated out checkrides, drank stale coffee, and swapped flying lies.

Founded in 1999, the Web site currently has documentation on nearly 1,400 airports. Freeman estimates that two-thirds of them are civil and one-third, military. The information is organized by state, and all 50 are represented. On the home page, click on the state you're interested in to go to a page showing cities and/or regions in that state. Click on a city/region to see a list of former airports in the area, and scroll down for the narratives.

Or, if you are looking for a specific long-gone airport but aren't sure exactly where it was located, do a Google search by entering "airfields-Freeman" and the name of the airport. If it exists on Freeman's site, the link to the page will appear.

I checked for airports in places I've lived and flown — Atlanta, western New York, northern New Jersey, Maryland, Kansas City, and southwest Florida. Most of the airports described — and there are many — closed years ago, long before I began boring holes into the sky. Yet, I recognized some that were active when I lived there: Stone Mountain Britt Memorial near Stone Mountain, Georgia; Aircraft Radio Corporation Airfield in Boonton, New Jersey; Johnnycake/Mountain Meadow Airport in Burlington, Connecticut; Woodbridge Airport in Woodbridge, Virginia; Grandview Airport/Richards Gebaur Air Force Base in Grandview, Missouri, south of Kansas City. Some are noted in my logbook.

Freeman's Web site is fascinating and absorbing. I found myself searching for a specific airport, then looking at all the other forgotten fields in the region. Airports that disappeared more than a half-century ago come back to life, thanks to the old sectionals, maps, and grainy black-and-white photos, and especially the recollections of pilots who trained there or the hand-me-down memories of their sons or daughters.

Most poignant are recent photos of old airfields. In some cases the runways, ramp, and a hangar or two still stand, although neglected and overgrown. In others the modern photo shows a faint scar in the land marking the site of a former runway, or else there's an office park or suburban housing tract obliterating any evidence of the past.

Freeman devotes a lot of time to his hobby, which he insists is just that — no commercial aspect to it. He gets about 200 e-mails a week pertaining to the Web site, and spends many nights and weekends updating it. An aerospace engineer in charge of software development for a manufacturer of military flight simulators, whenever possible Freeman takes the time on business trips to visit the site of a former airport and walk the grounds. It helps fuel his passion.

"I have no particular goal for the Web site," he says, then immediately contradicts himself: "Except political. I'd like to make people, particularly pilots, realize how many airports have been lost. I want to motivate people to not let airports go away."

In a time when general aviation airports are under increasing political and financial siege from neighbors, governing authorities, and developers, Freeman and friends are doing yeoman's work to catalog the history of airports that have already succumbed. Perhaps more important, they are helping to open our eyes to what the future might hold for the airfields we use and take for granted today.

"Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields." Check it out.