Illinois airport comments

Midway is my home 'drome.

It's an amazing place. Commercial, Biz, and general aviation all in one square mile patch of city.

Everything from SWA 737s, to Lears, and down to 152s... 3 FBOs, 2 Flight Schools...

I love this place.

I believe you just did. More details at

http://www.ousterhout.net/pjy-faq.html

I can't believe that nobody has mentioned the annual rec.aviation PJY fly-in here yet!

People still haven't given up on reopening Meigs:

http://www.friendsofmeigs.org/

Hmmm should have looked that up first ... I was in japan when that incident happened, 1998, and only heard the news second-hand. I note that several sources say the Air Force One that got stuck was a 707 not a 747. The president (Clinton) was carried away by a back-up aircraft, AF 26000, the same 707 that carried Kennedy to Dallas and his body home to Washington ... making Clinton the last sitting president ever to board that historic aircraft. Interesting.

Flew in here several times when I was stationed at Chanute AFB and flew with the Aero Club there. A nice field for training, all mod cons and little traffic. Will go down in history as one of the few places Air Force One ever had a reportable incident ... they cut a turn too short one day and ran one of AF One's bogeys into the black Illinois mud ... the president was transported by other means and the 747 was freed the next day. Since it was a military aircraft and the military, in the interest of national security (or is that the protection of pilot's from embarrassment) restricts all accident reports, even those from many years ago from public access. It's a shame the today's pilots can learn from the lessons of all commercial and private accidents, but can't learn from the findings of Air Force accidents ... which are very well investigated, by the way. Sad.

This airport is a join military-civilian facility in Illinois, but the civilian part (MidAmerica) was designed to server as a reliever for St-Louis (STL), just across the state line. However, it has never attracted any major airline service, and has been controversial as a result. The east runway (on the right of the image) is the one civilian one, maintained by St. Clair Co, IL., while the west runway is in the military base.

The name is O'Hare after a WWII aviator from Chicago. But the ORD designator come from the past. The present airport is built on the site of another, older airport that was known as Old Orchard Airport. You learn a lot when you've been stuck in terminals for hours and hours ... and when your itinerary includes KORD ... bank on it.

I first flew in here as a pax in December 1965. This was one of the USAF's finest Technical Training Centers. Went to my first USAF tech school here, became a technical classroom instructor and worked in the school for a while (training ran 24 hours a day at the time, 4 six hour shifts, LBJ was serious about getting bombs on target).

I went back to Chanute someyears later and became a computer geek, back when core memory was a significant step up from drum memory, which was the main memory (and system timing) for the early-day full task mission flight simulators. That was about the time that my technical life seemed to start accelerating at an ever increasing rate.

Since it was probably the best equipped tech training facility the USAF in its infinite wisdom selected Chanute to be closed in a down-sizing move. The people of Rantoul have done a marvelous job converting the former base property to useful functions.

Home of the monster tenderloin

The mall North of airport has a Chik 'Fil-A. Yum.

Lots of skydiving here.

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I did my Private Pilot training here.