I live and work near there. MidAmerica and Scott AFB are joint use. There’s a taxiway between the two runways. Scott AFB is still a military base which houses Transcom and Air Mobility Command plus a bunch of other smaller units.
MidAmerica loses about $12 million a year and our local government keeps pouring money into schemes for the airport that seldom work out. My tax money not at work. :mad:
To make matters worse, while MidAmerica was being built, Lambert in St. Louis decided that they needed another runway. They spend $1 billion (big B) to build the thing which included closing an entire town. One end of the runway is miles away from the terminal and the runway is seldom used.
Before 9/11 it may have made sense to build MidAmerica OR the new runway at Lambert, but not both. After 9/11 neither are needed. Heck American Airlines basically stopped using Lambert as a hub and has cut hundreds of flights.
Ah, yes – a lot of places did work on the assumption that “if you build it they will come” or at the very least “if you build it they won’t leave”, and either developed or expanded under the expectation that passenger loads and numbers of flights would be going nowhere but exponentially up. Little did they imagine that a bunch of airports built as hubs would today have a lot of vacant space and be mostly served by Regionals, and that the goal of the airlines would be to have fewer seats out there flying.
Dade-Collier TNT was proposed to be the southeastern USA’s hub for long-range SST’s and SuperJumbos and their stopping point between Europe and South America. The long-range SST was abandoned (and the long-range SuperJumbos only showed up decades later), so people quite sanely did the same to Dade-Collier.
Yep, after WW2 Stewart Field became a full-time AFB until 1970, when it was handed over to local GA and support for West Point use, and this was another case of the state thinking that they could latch on to a transferred airbase and redevelop it into something big.
Knock airport in Ireland was built largely through the lobbying of one man, Monsignor James Horan who mysteriously managed to persuade the Premier at the time, Charles Haughey, to finance its construction. A change of government saw the funding cut off, with the airport half-finished. Horan went on a fundraising drive, chiefly through a lottery, to raise the money. The facilities remained hugely underused for years, though it is now said to be the Republic’s 4th busiest with about 600,000 passengers a year.
The rise of RyanAir seems to have saved that airport. The airport is located in an area of high outward emigration so there’s plenty of demand for flights to Knock from British cities as people visit their families at home.
Agreed. The story I heard was that the investment in this airport was based on the assumption that gambling would be permitted at the Catskill resorts, that were dying (the Borscht Belt) in order to resuscitate them.
That didn’t happen. As for passenger flights it remains a white elephant. I don’t know if the cargo traffic actually makes it viable.
Clearly an airport built in the wrong spot for anything resembling commercial traffic. Even starting on 495, it’s probably easier to get to Boston’s Logan.
I worked in Worcester (at the hospital) for 2 years, and traveled by that area regularly, but had to look it up on a map to figure out where it is. In order to get to it, you’d have to get off of 290 (a disaster of a highway as it is.) then drive through the heart of Worcester to get to the terminal.
Columbia, SC has a lovely convenient airport that nobody local uses unless your company is picking up the tab - it’s shockingly expensive to fly out of for reasons that have never really been articulated to me, so most people drive to Charlotte (or now Southwest flies from Charleston.) You can get a shuttle service for 50 bucks a person that picks you up at your house and takes you to the Charlotte airport. It’s an insane waste.