Abandoned Airports - A Great Website

[trimtab]

Check out former airports in your geographical area on this website. Some are old military fields with X-ed out runways just sitting there like ghosts from the past.

There's also aerial photos. I thought Van Nuys was fascinating when it was surrounded with farmland and open space!

www.airfields-freeman.com/

[Galvin]

I thought Van Nuys was fascinating too, especially when I lived a block away from it back in the early fifties. The site of our old house on De Celis Avenue is now partially on airport property and directly in front of the row where my friend Pete Regina has his hangar.

The Air Guard had P-51s followed by F-86s and the runway was 2/3rds the length it is now. Having the airport close down to accommodate a squadron of P-51s returning from a gunnery shoot out on the desert and watching them come down the runway at 500' and peel off one by one in the break, the last one directly overhead and so close an eight year old boy could see directly up into the cockpit, is a memory I'll have for the rest of my life. Little wonder I ended up employed as a pilot and instructor most of my life.

Murphy's Valley Pilots flying service was a block east of our house and had a fenced area where wrecked airplanes were kept and where a young boy could "fly" a dilapidated Bamboo Bomber, or bellied in Mooney Mite and not be run off for trespassing. I guess the owner of the property saw me as a future renter of his airplanes rather than a potential vandal. Do that today and you'd likely be taken in for questioning. I even got a lot of Douglas B-26 fantasy time in one of the crated aircraft out in the area known as "the jungle" on the other side of the airport until On-Mark put it back into the air as a high speed executive conversion, the Lear Jet of its day.

The area was all bean fields and walnut trees when I moved there in 1951 but those soon disappeared as the post war housing boom took over. My old elementary school, Hayvenhurst Avenue, served as the airport offices until it was finally torn down and replaced by an office building in the seventies. Airplanes park today on asphalt marked with the faint traces of painted dodge ball circles and baseball diamonds of the recess yard still visible over fifty years after I went there as a student.

The old tower was still there on the east side of the airport, as were the hangars, all seen in the classic movie "Casablanca". The hangar row paralleling the old east-west runway that was once the primary and that served as the base of operations for the filming of Howard Hughes' "Hells Angels back in the late twenties still survive, albeit as manufacturing businesses and warehouses rather than hangars.

I did a paper in my last year of college that chronicled the airports that were in and had been in Los Angeles county and there were almost a hundred of them. Their history is a huge part of the history of aviation in the U.S. and they were the home bases at one time or other of nearly all the famous people in aviation. I am privileged to have known a few of them and extremely lucky to have grown up in an area so steeped in aviation history.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

That is pretty cool to see that stuff. The one in Douglas WY, when I was kid and a went with my dad while he was working in Douglas, was still in operation, but they had drag races on it on weekends. They still have drag races there now and it has been turned into a full time raceway.

There is a little airstrip south of Ten sleep WY too, I'm sure its not listed, looks like about a 3000' dirt strip in the bottom of a creek bottom, with a small shack, windsock and sign that says "Ten Sleep International Airport"

[Galvin]

Boy, going through the L.A. area airports sure brings back memories. I lived about a half mile south of the Grand Central Airport in Glendale in 1947-48-49 and one of my first memories was of a brand new North American Navion climbing out southbound and having the engine quit. The pilot put it into the L.A. river bed (that separated our veteran's housing project from the old Griffith Park National Guard airport where the L.A. Zoo is now located) and I and several other children got to the embankment in time to see four people climb out of it and congratulate themselves for being alive.

The picture of all the P-51s and B25s being overhauled in front of the hangars at Grand Central is VERY familiar to me because I was actually there to see that exact area and those very airplanes at that time. I found out years later that they were being refurbished under an aid program for South America and that's where most of them ended up. I say most of them because the following year the same area and the open area across the field and a little south were jammed with P-51s that the employees of the same company, Pacific Airmotive, were frantically IRANing and getting ready to ship to Korea. They would finish them and then spray some sort of weird plastic coating on them to protect them on their trip over to Japan where they were reassembled. They were packed onto the deck of an escort carrier to get them there as I recall.

The Messerschmitt 262 was also there at the Curtiss-Wright School the time and had belonged to Howard Hughes. It and the Razorback P-47D that was also at the Curtiss-Wright School ended up in Ed Maloney's collection. The Jug has been flying for years and the 262 is presently undergoing restoration with the intention of flying it.

Hughes had apparently acquired the jet for a shot at one of the cross country races; the Bendix in 1947. The Air Force supposedly stepped in and put the kibosh on Hughes flying the 262 in the race, primarily because they intended to enter a P-80 in the same race and it just would not do to have a WWII German relic (a recent relic but a relic nonetheless) blow the doors off what was at that moment the best and fastest fighter the recently (at that time) independent USAF had to offer. The 262 likely would have done it too.

Vultee Airport was on the east side of L.A. in Downey and although it closed prior to my learning to fly, the runways were, and to some extent still are, visible. The Space Shuttles were built there after North American took it over. David Vultee, son of Gerry, the founder of the Vultee Company, used to correspond with me and let me know when there were Vultee employee reunions.

L.C. Brand's little private field in front of his estate in the Glendale foothills was long gone too when I was flying. The airport itself is a now very old residential area and the estate itself is now a county park. In the late forties my family used to go up there and visit the caretaker, a fellow Glendale cop when my father was on the force.

I later made friends with a pilot named Len Green who turned out to have been L.C. Brand's personal pilot. He was a veritable trove of info about L.C. Brand, the movie industry of the twenties, the "Brand Castle" as it is known locally even today, and the airplanes Brand had, all of which he had flown. He told me that at one time there were crates and crates of new Curtiss Jennies that Brand had bought for pennies on the dollar stashed behind the castle. Think of what they would be worth today.

All those airports were in my bachelor's thesis I did in my last year of college and some, now long gone, I have actually landed on. I have friends who were based at some of those old fields back in the forties and one, Lou Baron, was even a pilot out of the 13 Black Cats field just east of LAX back in the twenties.

One field, not in L.A. but included in the link, deserves special mention because it gave me one of the eeriest feelings I have ever experienced in my flying career.

Gardner field out by the town of Taft at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley was a military primary training field during WWII. Such pilots as Chuck Yeager and Dick Bong, the highest scoring U.S. ace, got their start there. It was not even on the sectional chart in 1965 when I was completing my second solo cross country for my private license. I was coming south from Bakersfield toward the Santa Barbara mountains and heading toward Santa Barbara, mysecond stop.

It was so hazy I could see clearly only in a downward direction and I was wondering if I was getting lost because none of the landmarks I could see seemed to match the chart. The ground under me was for the most part relatively featureless and, combined with the haze, the sensation was that of being suspended in time.

Suspended that is until I suddenly saw the outlines of a complete WWII military base below me, complete with roads, runways, the foundations for a large number of barracks, and the regulation flagpole set in the middle of a large, painted, Army Air Corps insignia at the end of a grand entranceway. (The flagpole and boulevard are visible in one of the pictures in the link but the insignia must have been painted around the base of the pole at a later date than the photo.)

There were no airports, let alone a WWII military airport, shown on my map for miles in any direction. Talk about suddenly realizing you are in the twilight zone! I found out several years later from a friend that what I had seen was Gardner Field and by then it was long gone.

The K.O. Eckland mentioned in the Gardner Field entry has been a friend of mine for nearly forty years and was the one who clued me in on Gardner Field. I believe he may have landed his Aeronca there a few times even after it ceased being an active airport.

He was an L-5 pilot in S.E. Asia, an artist at the L.A. Times (as was our friend Eric who had the heart attack at age 31 and ended up a walking vegetable), is the originator of the widely used "Aerofiles" website that attempts to catalog every aircraft ever designed and built in the U.S., and the illustrator of most of Richard Bach's books.

The leather flying helmet I still use whenever I get a chance to fly in an open cockpit airplane was given to me by him just after I learned to fly.

[jetmex]

Trip down memory lane is right!

I was able to make a lot of trips to various airports all over the southwest, mainly to recover broken airplanes from one place or another.

Biggs AFB is the first airport I remember, it was where I was introduced to aviation by my dad when I was about five years old. Biggs had been one of the original Army airfields in the area; it was a SAC base then and had seen B-50's, B-36's and B-52's, all of which were familiar sights in the skies over El Paso. The main runways at Biggs and ELP International are on the same heading and about a mile apart. and it wasn't unusual for both military and civilian pilots to become confused and land at the wrong airport. I remember a Delta 727 landing at Biggs and getting all the way to the alert ramp before realizing where he was and beating a hasty retreat back to ELP. Another night, the tower called me about 1AM to let me know one of our planes was on the ground. Since we didn't usually have any late nighters, this was a bit of a surprise. I figured it was a divert from LAX, so I asked the tower what kind of airplane it was. He said a 707. We didn't have 707's then, so when I walked out on the ramp to marshall him in, I was greeted by a lost and embarrassed KC-135 looking for a place to turn around so he could leave!

Sunland Park Airport was in Anapra NM, just southwest of ELP. It was built next to the horse track that was there, to make it easier for the mucky-mucks to fly in and see their investments do their thing. At one time, there had been a FBO and T=hangars there, but by the time I was there, we were the only people flying anything out of the place. Our DC-3s and Twin Beeches would just fit in the old hangar, and we could do engine runs at all hours of the day or night without bothering anyone. ELP was a fifteen minute flight and a twenty minute drive away. The airport was technically within the El Paso city limits, but since Texas didn't allow betting, the track and airport were in New Mexico by way of some creative land management.

There were Army airfields in El Paso Deming, Big Spring, Sweetwater, Hobbs, Abilene, Las Cruces -- all of them are still there. There are a bunch of little unnamed auxiliary strips all over the desert that aren't even on the maps. The battleship silhouettes painted on the hillsides outside of Deming that were used for skip bombing practice are still visible in some places.

Stahmann Farms (outside Las Cruces) raised pecans and had their own airstrip. Old man Stahmann was a warbird buff and had a PV-2 Ventura, and A-26, a P-51 and several T-6's at his place. When he died, he requested to be cremated and scattered over his farm from the PV-2. The mechs built a dump tube into the Ventura, and on the specified day, loaded the family and friends into the airplane and off they went. When the crew tried to dump the ashes, the negative pressure outside the tube blew half of them back into the airplane and all over the people inside. They never did quite get it all cleaned up, and after that, the crews who flew and worked on the PV-2 swore that old man Stahmann's ghost was still in there with them.

I miss all of that....

[trimtab]

Thanks for your chapters in history, both of you! I discovered this website in my latest issue (November) of Air & Space, Smithsonian.

Galvin: Here's another closed airport where you lived nearby as a toddler. South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts. It's in the "Massachusetts: Boston area, Southeastern" link.
www.airfields-freeman.com/MA/Airfields_MA.htm

Back in the late seventies while I was in the reserves working one night in Weymouth Air Ops, a Piper Arrow landed on runway 35 thinking he was landing on 35 at Norwood Airport 15 or so miles away. This happened once in awhile as it does at other airports near to each other with similar configurations. Ten years later while working as a consultant at Kaman Aerospace in Bloomfield, Connecticut, I discovered during lunch with the director of engineering for this company that HE was the pilot of that Arrow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SH-2_Seasprite

Once, during a pre-air show rehearsal featuring the Blue Angels, I met with the local news people to coordinate their ride with number 7. One of them admitted to me that she nearly landed her Piper Cherokee on runway 35 thinking she was approaching Norwood. A former Miss New Hampshire, it can happen to the best and to the best looking! www.ci.norwood.ma.us/Airport/Default.htm

Norwood airport was previously located a mile or so away in the town of Canton and it had that town's name. I mention this because it was where the Helio Courier was first tested by its designer, MIT Professor Otto Koppen. Dr. Koppen's daughter was one of the test pilots and was killed in a crash while testing this airplane. His daughter-in-law was a former co-worker and friend of mine who met Koppen's son while on one of our party trips to the Cape. Also, the Hindenburg shot some practice approaches to this airport on one of its trips to the U.S.
Max Conrad often had his long range tanks installed here where he launched some of his record-breaking flights.

Recently, I met Dr. Norma Granville, (retired) daughter of the oldest of the Granville brothers who lost his life I believe in 1932. My wife and I had dinner together with her at a museum function and I've arranged to have her speak at another museum. She has some original letters written by Jimmy Doolittle to her father and I expect she'll be donating them to the air museum in Connecticut at Bradley Field in Windsor Locks. She speaks proudly of her father as having only an eighth-grade education. Her uncles were somewhere in grammer school when they dropped out to work on the family farm in New Hampshire for survival. They later moved to Springfield, Mass. and worked as automobile mechanics, and then came the GeeBee!

A few years ago, I met Robert Morgan, pilot of Memphis Belle fame, through the Collings Foundation. Later on, I contacted him and he agreed to speak at the air museum. Unfortunately, he passed away a few months before he was scheduled. During this same program when I met Morgan, I also met Paul Tibbets (Enola Gay). Friendly, and a pleasure to talk to, he can also be feisty for an old timer. Said he was never promoted to brigadier general until late in his career. He's very proud of this because he was "never a brown nose or an ass kisser like a lot of other people I knew"!

During this gathering, I also met Rudolph "Rudy" Opitz who's in his nineties now (if he's still alive). He was the chief test pilot of the ME 163 rocket plane and has been living in Connecticut (for many years). Both Opitz and Tibbets wore hearing aids in both ears. Opitz could hear fairly well, but Tibbets struggled to hear me with a raised voice.

[jetmex]

Lots of good stories, keep 'em coming.

Two of my favorite airports around home were in Fabens, and a little place called West Texas Airport.

Fabens is a few miles east of El Paso and is mainly a duster strip for all the farms in the Lower Valley. It is home to an old guy whose specialty is rebuilding wings for Stearman biplanes, a business started to support the PT-17 crop dusters that used to be the backbone of that kind of flying. Right across the ramp is Senor Pena's shop, where some really nice warbird restorations take place. Pena did a lot of work for Frank Borman (the astronaut), including a beautiful Waco biplane and a couple of P-51s. If you weren't looking for the place, you'd probably never find it. For many years, the wreckage of an Avro Anson lay beside the dirt road that led to Pena's hangar. I'm told that some Canadian warbird organization found the airplane by accident, bought it for some ungodly amount of money, and took it back to Canada for restoration.

West Texas Airport is basically a 2000 foot asphalt strip that used to be in the middle of desert nowhere, also east of El Paso. It was built by a local air conditioning contractor who got tired of paying tiedown fees at ELP. Eventually, the place became home to all the big airport refugees who didn't have the cash it took to keep their airplanes elsewhere. During my lean years, I supported my family by freelancing there. There was another mechanic there as well, from Iceland, who was the best sheet metal man I've ever known. He worked for Continental also, to supplement his income, and built the side box that is attached to my rollaround toolbox. There is a small museum at the airport housing some odd homebuilts, a T-38 cockpit simulator that came from who knows where, and a Vickers Varsity whose wings were sheared off in some kind of crash test. Parts of the Chuck Norris movie "Lone Wolf McQuade" were filmed here, and if you look real close in the scene where the DC-3 lands to unload guns, you'll see a guy who looks a lot like me throwing crates out of the airplane.

Fabens is still active, but WestTex is slowly being swallowed up by the subdivisions that are going up all around it, and may not be there much longer. Fabens may not be either. For some odd reason, the people who build houses near active airports always seem to complain about the noise later on......

[trimtab]

Don't quite know how to say this. . . .but. . . . I guess I could say I have a wife who was born practically next to the B-36. Wouldn't want to say I have a B-36 for a wife though. She's certainly far better looking, very quiet and very much a lady. She was born at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth during the heyday of this airplane. Her sister was eleven years old and remembers the B-36 as though it were yesterday. However, when I ask questions (probably sounding like a small boy) about those years, her sister remembers how "HUGE and NOISY" (and silvery) they were as they flew all day and all hours of the night. That's about all she can say. Not much for oral history.

On a sad note, her mother lost her life on an Air Force C-97 dependant's flight. It departed the west coast, Travis I believe, with a final destination to Japan and crashed about 200 miles off the coast of Japan. Her father was the commanding officer of a medical facility there and suddenly became a single parent.

Her exposure to the Air Force, the Pentagon and NASA (father retired from NASA as medical director of occupational medicine) certainly gave us some common interests. She's very supportive of my interests in aviation and RC airplanes and is always ready to travel around the Northeast to an RC show and the WRAM Show in Westchester (White Plains) New York.

[Galvin]

Said he was never promoted to brigadier general until late in his career. He's very proud of this because he was "never a brown nose or an ass kisser like a lot of other people I knew"!

"The only difference between a brown noser and an ass kisser is depth perception." Galvin's fifth axiom.

I checked out South Weymouth NAS, which was very near where we lived on the south shore of Whitman's pond at 1 Lakeshore Drive. Even though I was a kid in diapers in mid-1945 I still can remember the gray/silver Navy blimps loaded with depth charges going over the pond as they circled on their way out to join up with some convoy. The sound of a WWII Navy blimp with two Warner engines is as distinctive to me to this day as the sound of a Merlin. My parents were astounded that I could identify most airplanes I saw by the age of three and sometimes only by sound. Whitman's Pond shows up in the sectional just west of the NAS. In 1976 I actually got to go up in Goodyear's blimp "Columbia", based next to the 405 freeway in Carson about 10 miles SE of LAX. Revell had made a toy version of the blimp that was lit internally and had a message scroll inside that showed any message you wished to write on it through a rectangular opening on one side of the blimp. Goodyear thought it was the bee's knee's and those involved in developing it (plus myself and my then wife, neither of whom WERE involved) got a ride in the blimp.

I went into the San Fernando valley airports and checked out my first place of employment, San Fernando Airport. What the blurb leaves out is the fact that the San Fernando drag strip, one of the early shrines of the sport of drag racing, was in the riverbed immediately adjacent to the north side of the strip. I saw several aircraft land on the drag strip, the most memorable being a T-28A that landed just as two double A fuelers were set to be launched down the strip in a runoff heat. My first clue that something was amiss was the panic in the voice of the announcer as he yelled "Hold 'em up, hold em up, we got an airplane on the strip." I looked over at the drag strip, which was about ten feet lower than our runway and exactly parallel to it, and saw the top of a vertical fin heading southwest toward the starting line.

The course marshal climbed up on the airplane via the step in the lowered flaps and after fingers were pointed, hands waved, and heads nodded, the airplane did a one-eighty and took off. He did not, however land back at San Fernando. Too embarrassed I guess. The crowd loved it and I'm sure that most thought it was part of the day's festivities.

The Tom Ryan mentioned in the captions was my boss as well as being the head of the vocational training department for the Glendale City school district, a Navy Captain in the Reserve, Squadron Commander for an S2F anti-sub unit at Los Alamitos NAS, and Richard Nixon's brother in law...his sister was Pat Nixon.

We used to get airplanes clipping the wires every now and then, once fatally for four ministers in a Bellanca Cruisair that went in and burned at the north end. A Cessna Cardinal from the big Sky Roamers flying club at Burbank once went through the residential power lines at the south end but kept on flying, coming around and landing with wire scrapes and big holes burned in the wings and fuselage from the electrical shorts. It knocked out power to the area, including the airport, for a couple of days.

Several weeks later the same airplane showed up after being repaired and repainted. Tom Ryan eyed it with evident disgust as it taxied back for take off. The accident had almost shut us down and had cost us money. He watched it break ground and then turned around and sat down when he was sure it would clear the wires. At that moment, someone, and we never really determined who, shut off the main electrical breaker to the office and the lights went out. Ryan jumped out of his chair screaming "God Damn it, not again" and I thought we were going to have to use a tranquilizer dart to subdue him. When he figured out it was only a prank he vowed to kill the perp but was still so upset he went home early.

I loved San Fernando. It started as a 2000' long C-47/DC-3 maintenance airport during the war and ended as most of the parking lot for a big box store. That "unidentified building" in one of the pictures is on the approximate site of the store itself. That building was supposed to be our ground school but it hadn't been used in years when I was there in 1968-69. There was a cutaway Kinner B-5 engine in there that I'm very sad I didn't get before the airport went away in 1985. I could write several books about the goings on at just San Fernando and all the characters there.

Whiteman Airpark was and still is next door, close enough for our patterns to overlap. Being on downwind heading northeast while Whiteman traffic was on a parallel base going southwest between me and San Fernando's runway happened more times than I can remember. Dueling patterns.

Indian Dunes was the site of the filming of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and closed down soon after the series ended. It was always a private strip and later became an ATV/motorcycle course for a short time. Visible in the background looking south is a low mesa which had an oil company strip on top of it, a favorite place to practice forced landings because it was deserted. Myself and a student crashed the only airplane I ever wrecked there when the engine quit during a go around from a forced landing approach.

The student, Ray Hendrix, was as crazy a guy you will ever meet but so low key you would never suspect it. He finally lost his license several years later for parachuting skydivers unannounced into Dodger Stadium during a game. The divers all got caught and, of course, ratted him out. When the FAA discovered that his rickety old Beech 18 had not had an annual in years, not to mention that the prop and spar ADs had never been complied with, it was bye bye license.

That oil company strip was also the site of the mini-MiG base we found up there several years later. Lockheed was using the mini-base and a radion controlled model carrying a TV camera to develop basic RPV procedures. The Predator and its ilk can trace much of their beginnings to that little mesa back in the late sixties/early seventies.
WAY to many stories for each airport I knew and flew into in the L.A. area to bore everyone with here.

[propnuts]

In the early to mid-50's I lived in Van Nuys as well but was only 5-6 years old when my father took me to a place Galvin may remember but didn't mention. We lived very near what is now the 405 Frwy (it took the houses across the street) and Victory Blvd. Probably less than two miles from there, somewhere north as I recall, there was a paved open field which I seem to recall had basketball court markings painted on it. Early RC'ers flew out of that field which was surrounded by weeds as tall as I was. I recall seeing pilots with their early escapement systems chasing wayward planes. One would be leaning out the passenger side of the car with the transmitter while the other drove, chasing the plane. I have no idea what the paved area had been originally. Looking at Google Earth, I see there is a flying field in the Sepulveda basin now, just a couple miles south of what I was describing. Don't know if it could be the same area although it is much more developed with a couple of control line circles visible now.

I sent some info to the guy running the lost fields site. He had a broken link to the old Kellogg airport in Pomona which was the ranch the cereal magnate built in the 20's. He wanted to raise Arabian horses and was trying to decide between Pomona and San Luis Obispo and for whatever reasons (supposedly a coin toss) settled on Pomona. He put in the first airport in the area and got Lindbergh to overfly the airport. I work at Cal Poly University which still raises Arabians and has taken over what used to be Kellogg Ranch.

www.csupomona.edu/~library/specialcollections/history/airport.html




The Google Earth shot is oriented to the same view. The bulk of the old strip is buried under one of the campus parking lots. The "U" shaped building in the lower left is the original stables for the Arabians. They are now housed in the building at the center right of the color shot. Last year we had a double fatal aircrash with one survivor in some of the open farm land not visible in this shot. It was in the dark, in open land with no landmarks in the middle of three competing, responding law enforcement agencies. To settle any future issues I am getting hand held GPS units for the units and showing them how to use the ones in the cars.

[Galvin]

Where you lived was very near to where my friend K.O. Ecland, mentioned in my previous posts here, used to live. The model flying field you went to in Van Nuys was the same one I used to get to by any means I could find back in the fifties. He ived between Sepulveda and the 405 just south of Victory Blvd.

The field you mention was also in the Sepulveda Flood Basin but was farther north and nearer to Victory Boulevard and also far less complex than the present larger model flying site used today. It was just a few control line circles and a runway was put in when radio control started becoming popular.

Free flight and control line eventually faded in favor of mostly radio control just before the field was moved south. There are still a few moldy figs flying control line there but infrequently.

[Patch]

Although not a totally abandoned airport, I just got back from the UK. The customer plant I was visiting was an old bomber base and build/repair area called Bourn airfield. They use the hangers now for production use. There is still evidence on the buildings from German strafing runs. It was pretty cool. Also hit the Duxford air museum while I was there.

[trimtab]

Galvin:

Yesterday, I drove around Whitman's Pond in Weymouth but could not remember your old address. Checking my local map afterward, looks like you lived on the edge of a small peninsula. Next time I'll check out One Lakeshore Drive and return with a description. I don't have a digital camera. . . . sorry. However, if I can arrange for a photo, I'll be glad to place it here.

If you were born in the South Shore Hospital in South Weymouth, it's located about one-half mile from the approach end of runway 17 at the former NAS. Back when you were born, the runways were probably on a drawing board when the base was exclusively for blimps. Yes, I remember the familiar steady drone/hum of blimp engines. Their sound seemed stationary as they moved slowly. The PBY's also seemed stationary and were extremely loud as they flew slowly and appeared to be slightly faster than a blimp.
www.sshosp.org/

[Galvin]

My parents were renting the house at 1 Lakeshore Drive, the first house on the left as you drive off the main road onto Lakeshore Drive and turn onto Lakeshore. There were two pillars at the entrance to the neighborhood, both constructed of round stones cemented together and maybe twelve feet tall. One had fallen over and was on its side by the entrance the last time I was there in 1990.

I believe the Weymouth NAS had runways at the time I was living there because I remember lots of fixed wing aircraft flitting around too; PBYs, PV-1 and PV-2 Harpoons, and the occasional Hellcat as I recall.

[jetmex]

This is a great site, keep finding neat stuff. It turns out my son lives and works on the site of the old Baton Rouge Municipal Airport. The school where he teaches (Tara High) is near the end of the old runways, and one of the original hangars is now an office/pavilion for the BTR park system and not too far from the school.

Another interesting find was an F4 Phantom on blocks in front of the USMC recruiting office across the street from where the airport was. The airplane is in great condition and appears to be well taken care of. I've heard there is a TBF Avenger in the USS Kidd Museum, will have to check that out next time I go for a visit.