Branching off from this thread on best and worst airports, what’s your experience with really small airports?
When I was in grad school, Willard Airport in Champaign Illinois was tiny, with one airline (Ozark) a few rental car counters and like three gates. It’s grown.
Then there is the Stockton, California, airport. Only one airline, two gates (maybe) and mostly commercial transport like FedEx. The big event there was getting a Subway, and not just vending machines. Parking is free if you don’t stay overnight.
Trenton NJ had a small airport also with flights to Boston, Washington and Harrisburg. Great airport to fly to Boston from, except that if there weren’t enough people on the return flight they decided that the runway lights were out and put you on a plane to Philadelphia and then on a van to Trenton.
Other good ones? John Wayne, mentioned in the other thread, is a bit bigger than these.
I live fairly close to that one, and I remember in pre-9/11 days that it was probably the coolest way to fly: drive up ten minutes before your flight, park in a free supermarket-style lot, walk through a metal detector, get a laminated card with your seat assignment, and hop on the plane. That’s the way flying should be.
I was in a taxi touring the island Dominica in the Caribbean. The road we were on was a rutted dirt track, yet it was a “main road”. We drove by a small strip of asphalt. I asked if the road was being paved. No, it was the airport.
ETA: we also drove by a small home with barred windows. It was a jail for truant students!
My brother lives in Chicago while our family is in the Philadelphia area. He loves the Trenton airport. Not many airlines service it. He flies Frontier when he’s in and out of Trenton.
I used the Long Beach airport once and I thought it was really cute.
A couple years ago when there was a weekend closure of the 405 Freeway, everyone in L.A. was terrified of what the weekend traffic would be like (it ended up not being so bad). As a promotional gimmick, JetBlue was offering free flights from Long Beach to Burbank. I kinda wanted to do it just for fun but I didn’t end up doing it.
I use John Wayne frequently and it is certainly much much smaller than San Diego or LAX but I wouldn’t have thought of it for this Thread. It’s a small airport but not really a tiny airport (ditto Bob Hope Airport in Burbank).
I flew Frontier from TTN to MDW. There’s no jetway there, just stairs up to the plane; however, unlike every other time I’ve seen them, the stairs aren’t mounted on the back of a truck. They are manually pushed into place by a ground crewman, kind of like what they have in Home Despot to reach something from the higher shelves. Push into place, put the brake on, allow passengers to walk up/down.
Not counting the ‘small but significant’ airports where I have lived (Canton-Akron and Huntsville, each with about 6-10 gates), there has been:
Newport News Patrick Henry: When I flew from there in the late 1980’s, it was all prop-jobs to 2-3 cities. Scariest flight I ever had was PHF to Baltimore in a 7-passenger Beechcraft in the middle of a Thunderstorm.
Ayers Rock, Australia and Balta Island, Galapagos: Both get about 4-5 flights a day for the tourist trade and have only the bare basics to get you in and out of the airport grounds fast.
Masai Maru, Kenya: I have no idea if the fields have names. I was on a single-engine DHC-3 Otter that looked older than I was, flying over the Great Rift Valley and landing on grass fields that looked exactly like the rest of the ground.
The third field was mine, and as I was delivered into the hands of my guides, I saw a small, tin-metal shack at the edge (the only building I saw at any of the fields) that looked to have been deserted since the British left. Someone had put up a hand-written sign “Duty-Free Shop.” I needed that laugh after that flight.
Our local airport is like the one the OP describes - 3 “gates” (really, one large room with 3 doors), a few rental car companies, and (sometimes) a snack bar. The snack bar comes and goes, I suspect it doesn’t make any real money so someone runs it for a while, then gives up, then someone else gives it a go until they, too, decide it’s not worth while.
But flying out of there is wonderful. I can leave an hour before my flight and have plenty of time, and 25-35 minutes of that is driving. Pretty sure I could push that to 45 minutes before the flight and be fine. Parking is $5/day, and you park right in front of the airport. No walking for hours through parking garages or huge lots.
Bonus: it’s also a repair hub, so if/when something goes wrong with the plane, they fix it right there, no waiting for parts to be flown in or whatever. Very handy.
TWT: Sanga-Sanga airport on the island of Tawi Tawi, in the Philippines. Back in the 1990s when I flew in and out of there, the runway was a grass field and PAL (Philippine Airlines) flights came twice a week, weather permitting. A pretty remote airport.
We flew in and out of a small airport in Kotlas, Russia a couple times. Two-three flights per week, prop aircraft. You had to roll your luggage out onto the tarmac and hand it to the guy who was stowing it in the belly of the plane.
I flew into the El Real airport in the Darien in Panama several times. It was the kind of strip where the pilot had to make a couple of passes before landing to scare the cows off it. There were no buildings, only an open-walled shack where you could wait. Back in the 1970s, we usually camped at the airstrip overnight to be first in line for the morning flight (and because there were no hotels in town).
I can’t find any photos, but the airport at Yaviza in the Darien is similar.
The El Porvenir airport, on an island in Kuna Yala (San Blas), is also rather interesting.
These are actual airports with scheduled flights. I’ve also landed at some remote airstrips that were even more primitive, like the one at Canain the Darien. This one is particularly scary since the airstrip slopes downhill toward a line of trees.
I live a few miles from the College Park Airport, “the world’s oldest continually operating airport.” There are no commercial flights, but it is a fully functioning airport.
The milk run from Ketchikan to Anchorage AK puddle jumps to all sorts of little airports. Sitka, Wrangell, Petersburg… They are all different and fun in their own way.
Quincy, Illinois has a small airport with a very interesting building. It has a ticket counter with one agent, and a bookshelf that a volunteer from the library keeps stocked; people can leave or take books if they wish.
Most of the commercial flights are Learjet-sized planes that go to or from St. Louis, but Air Force One landed there in 2010, which surprised pretty much everybody. We all figured that runway was too small for anything but an emergency landing of a plane that big.
I’ve flown in and out of the Columbia Missouri airport a few times. It’s about the size of a doctor’s waiting room - hospital tile floors, two gates. I do rather like their Airport Master Plan.
The whole website is rather delightful, with things like this (these are direct copy/paste):
Having some friends with their own planes I get to see some of the small “county” airports now and then. From ones like Rostraver (which is more than a grass field but not by much) to bigger ones like Allegheny County and Wyoming Valley. What gets me is how some have raised security since 9/11 but others have not. One I was basically roaming around the hangers for an hour and no one seemed really concerned or asked me what I was doing. I’m not saying its a bad thing but it is something that catches you attention these days.
