I know of two of these and want to know if there are others.
The Dade-Collier Training N’ Transition Airport (TNT really is a great name for an airport) was built to be the Everglades Jetport serving Miami, FL. They finished one very long runway and never got any farther. It’s severely underused.
While roaming Google maps last night I found Montreal’s Mirabel International. It was built to replace Dorval and there were laws that said international flights had to land there. Even the force of law failed to make it successful and it now serves only cargo.
I’m looking for others, open or closed that were built to replace an existing airport and never really did and so are quiet or closed.
MidAmerica St. Louis Airport was built in 1997 and was intended to relieve congestion at Lambert, but it never attracted much carrier attention, and Lambert’s congestion promptly went away when American bought TWA and decided that Lambert wasn’t so great as a hub, particularly in the flying downturn in the aftermath of 9/11.
The proposed Peotone airport is almost certain to be included on this list if the state of Illinois manages to get it built. It, too, is intended to relieve congestion at a big airport, in this case O’Hare, but O’Hare is in the midst of a big expansion project, and none of the carriers there want a new airport anyway. Especially not one, like Palmdale, at the corner of no and where and with no transportation infrastructure to it.
MidAmerica Airport (BLV) located near the thriving metropolis of Belleville, Illinois was supposed to be a reliever for St. Louis’ Lambert International Airport and a “hub” airport where airlines would have passengers change planes rather than relying on origination and destination traffic.
Currently it has two round-trip scheduled passenger flights per week and some cargo flights.
Oops. BorgHunter beat me!
Gary/Chicago International Airport (GYY) was supposed to be another candidate for Chicago’s “third” airport but will be losing its sole major airline this month (Allegiant), and in the last year listed in the article, 2010, they only had just over 2100 passenger hoardings that year - and that was up significantly from the previous year.
Tokyo-Narita is the main international airport there, but it’s always been constrained by some rice paddies right where the runways should be. After some bloody riots during initial construction, the government decided never to try eminent domain on them again.
I see KBLV used to be Scott AFB - not sure a preexisting military field whose civilian conversion has been a disappointment are really what the OP is after, either. But there are more than a few of them.
WEll, its not a major airport, but the Worcester (MA) airport has zero passenger traffic, and it costs MASSPORT about $8 million/year to run. The guy at the car rental counter sleeps most of the day.
In the various Spanish Communities a whole bunch of provincial capitals and regional second cities went kookoo over airport projects during the '00s. Entirely new airports when a mere upgrade would have sufficed. International-hub capacity terminals at fields that had never had anything but regional feeder traffic. Airports less than an hour’s drive from one or even two other perfectly adequate-capacity airports. And so on.
At least Ciudad Real and Huesca were open for a while before failing. The crown jewel of airport madness was Castellón’s Costa Azahar airport, “inaugurated” in 2011 yet to this day not having seen one single commercial revenue passenger and now it turns out they may have to tear up and redo the entire runway all over again.
Scott AFB is still Scott AFB. Mid-America is basically a $300+ million single-runway airport built next door to Scott, with the two facilities agreeing to connect their runways and share the control tower.
Even general aviation tends to avoid Mid-America, preferring Bi-State Parks Airport, which is much closer to downtown St. Louis and is able to handle everything except the largest jets.
At the time the airport was planned in the late 60s, most transatlantic flights needed to stop and refuel in a city like Montreal before heading to their final destination, and Mirabel was built to accommodate that throughput.
However, by the time it was completed in 1975, technological advances allowed more aircraft to fly non-stop, so now this new airport had no sizable market to service, given that Montreal already had an airport. Worse, while the first airport was in town, Mirabel was off-island, an hour’s drive away, and out of reach of public transit.
Being so inaccessible, nobody went there, so the government responded by simply banning all international flights from the former airport and rerouting them to Mirabel. This kept Mirabel alive for 20 years, even as Airlines eliminated international flights to Montreal entirely.
Now that that ban is lifted, there are no domestic flights from Mirabel, just cargo and mail.
It’s huge, and lovely. Occasionally used as a shooting location, for example The Terminal starring Tom Hanks about ten years back.
Mammoth Lakes, California is a tiny ski town with overly ambitious dreams. They signed an agreement with a company to allow the construction of a huge resort in exchange for the extension of the runways of the local airport to allow 757s to land. My friend told me it was going to be an international airport. A couple of bad ski seasons and FAA requirements caused finances to go all FUBAR and the town of 7700 had to defualt on a $43M contract, 3 times its annual budget and forcing it into bankruptcy.
Stewart Airport, in the Hudson Valley about 55 miles north of New York City. When Nelson Rockefeller was governor around 1970, the government bought a bunch of farmland around the existing airport which had minor traffic (general aviation for the small city of Newburgh, plus a long runway for occasional flights related to West Point Military Academy), intending it to become the NY metro area’s third international airport (after JFK and Newark). It never happened. There are a few commercial flights a day, but they’re expensive and inconvenient for most. More cargo, I think. The state lands have mostly reverted to forest, used for hunting and birdwatching, with a bit if warehouse development along a bordering interstate highway.
The movie “Warm Bodies” used the Mirabel terminal and runways extensively, and if you get the DVD there are some interesting extra features that go into more detail about converting a dead airport into a post-zombie apocalypse airport.
They also used the very nearly dead Montréal sports stadium as a location.
Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz shot scenes for “Knight and Day” at the Worcester terminal. I happened to be in it a couple of days later, and the “Welcome to Wichita” signs and the fake airline signs over the check-in counters were still there.
So many airlines have tried and died there, having been attracted by the location but not noticing the poor ground access. Unless the state someday puts in an access road instead of miles of city streets, it will always be more attractive for most to ride the Pike right into Logan.
Mirabel does have an industrial base now, with Bell Helicopter and Bombardier using it for major assembly/test operations.
Grumman left a large airport at Calverton, Long Island behind when it got out of the airframe business. But it’s just closed now, not turned into a public airport.
I believe there are a several airports in the Middle East that are massively out of scale to both the traffic they actually handle and all traffic they can ever be expected to handle. Oil wealth (and hubris) built them, and they run at about 10% capacity.
My favorite airport oddity is Nicosia, on Cyprus. After the war in the early 70s, it was left stranded between factions and abandoned. I think the UN took it over as a base recently.
