Cloudy skies and strong winds from several directions were less than ideal weather for this Sunday morning flight in a small Piper. But I wanted to land - maybe for the last time - on Meigs Field on a peninsula next to Chicago's downtown skyscrapers.
This airfield had a special meaning for me: I had co-authored a flight manual for the most popular Microsoft private simulator game that used Meigs Field as the visual background. I had booked a flight to Europe and wouldn’t return for the next months. So I was eager to fly to Meigs - maybe for the last time.
During the preceding months, rumor was that Mayor Daley who was at a crossroads with the then-governor, planned to close the airport. This way he would impede the governor from landing with his jet at Meigs, the closed airport to the Illinois governor's office. OK, rumors only …
Shortly after World War II the airport had been built on the Northerly Island peninsula. Being close to downtown Chicago made it popular for business, medical flights, and commercial aviation. It even had two instrument approaches.
In Spring 2003, large X’s were carved into the runway, rendering it unusable and trapping a handful of aircraft based there. Approaching airplanes that had to divert, learned that not even the airport employees or controllers knew what was going on. Heavy equipment operators - ordered by Mayor Daley - had come at night to the airport to dig massive ditches into the runway. It was an illegal closure of an airport, as the city was not giving the required 30-day notice.
Flying Magazine: Phil Boyer, AOPA’s president at the time, called out Daley for a
lack of honor: “The sneaky way he did this shows that he knows it was wrong.”
For several months, pilot organizations and aviation groups lobbied for the repair of the runway and the reopening of Meigs Field, but it was not to be. In the Fall of 2003, the destruction of Meigs Field began and it is now a park with a small lake, a beach, a visitor center, and a planetarium.
Read more:
https://www.flyingmag.com/the-cautionary-tale-of-the-destruction-of-meigs-field/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/day-shut-down-meigs-field-180952788/
https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-history-of-merrill-c-meigs-field.html
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