Comments for Illinois, United States

I was coming in at night and the airport is very hard to find among all the other light clutter. A very patient tower controller turned ry30 up full and turned all the other runway lights off to make it easier to find.

There's a station for the "L" train Orange Line in the terminal: ~25 minutes to downtown and the Loop.

This is where Porter Airlines flies from downtown Toronto.

Nice People !!!

According to the wikipedia entry for O'Hare (which I can't link as an anonymous coward) the airport was originally Orchard Field Airport.

Reply to @ptomblin:

Nope, no hospital nearby. This is a municipal helistop and is in the middle of a large area of office buildings. My guess is that planners thought that there would be some helicopter traffic to and from the buildings and wanted to plan for general access instead of every building needing it's own stop. This, obviously, was not needed as the helicopter as a mode of everyday travel is simply silly for most people.

Always like going into Freeport to meet up with the parents. Nice long strip, however it was short field landings today to maintain proficiency.

Just a quick stop for gas on my way to Oklahoma from Oshkosh.

Windy City Soaring based at Hinckley (0C2).

Nice Grass Strip 2600x100.

Enjoyed a day of Soaring over North Central Illinois thanks to the Windy City Soaring club. Go check it out.

Busy field during primary training with mixed traffic. Pattern always seemed full and extending downwind was normal.

Nice for practice field outside of busy Chicago airspace.

Great airport for both Hard surface and soft surface TO/LDG

I started primary training here a long while back.

Home to A&M Aviation - excellent training and services. Thanks Al.

Just an awesome training, flying service and friendly people around.

What else to say - nice airport with a great restaurant under a class B shelf

we were looking at the work that was just done to the txy.

Great airport restaurant

I can't believe the airport is closed. It was my default airfield for Microsoft's Flight Simulator and I have landed there hundreds of times and flown to and from O'Hare airport as many times. It's a shame!

Reply to @XingR:

Actually the original name of the airport was Orchard Downs "ORD"

I had the pleasure of stopping here in late 1998 before it was criminally bulldozed. Absolutely FANTASTIC setting. They even made us do a go-around while they shot the "cannon" at geese near the runway, so we got a bonus view of being in the pattern well below the skyscrapers!

The FAA uses '86IL' for Sharp Airport, Bethany, IL

The FAA uses 'IL50" instead of 'SIS6' for this airport

That big building across the street is probably a hospital.

Oops, didn't mean to imply that the airport was unusable... The E/W runway is 1800 feet long, and clear at both ends.

Although this airport has a 1300 foot north/south strip, it's pretty much unusuable due to the high tension power lines at the south end of the field.

Anyone know why this exists? 06C is practically right around the corner, so I have to imagine that there was a specific reason to build this helipad where it is.

Hello to all ! Greetings From Poland. very Good Page !

This is a nice E/W field adjacent to Illinois Route 15 between Belleville, IL and East St. Louis, IL. Very easy to sight on due to diagonal SW/NE 4-lane highway right next to it. St. Elizabeth's Hospital is very quickly reached from here.

This beautiful airport was closed by criminals!

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.