Contrails: Yesterday’s Treasures

By Steve Weaver

Beacon tower at U.S. Air Mail field at North Platte, Nebraska. (National Air and Space Museum Archives)If you’ve ever flown into the Elkins, West Virginia Airport (EKN) on a clear night you may have noticed during your approach to the airport that the rotating beacon became visible much sooner than you might expect. And if you stopped to consider that the airport is tucked into a broad valley guarded to the east and west by fifteen hundred foot ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, you might have wondered how you could see the beacon at all. The answer of course is that a beacon is located near the airport, but at the very top of the eastern mountain ridge. That in itself isn’t so unusual, but I find the origin of that beacon to be very interesting.

Aviation history has always had a great fascination for me. I love reading about it, and examining preserved items in aviation museums across the country is one of my favorite things to do. However, the thing that really fires my imagination is stumbling across the bits and pieces of yesterday’s aviation that still exist outside of museums.

There’s a website called Abandoned and Little Known Airfields (www.airfields-freeman.com) which I like to visit and I recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in aviation’s past. Historian Paul Freeman has, for many years, been documenting airports nationwide that are either abandoned or completely gone, and he has collected hundreds of these and categorized them by state, so it is easy to see where airports used to be in areas that are of interest to you. He chronicles the history of each airport and shows it as it was depicted on the old aeronautical charts. If they are available, and usually they are, he posts photographs of the airport in its heyday as well as sad recent pictures of the ruins. In the case of airports that have been swallowed by development, he posts photos of how the area appears today and describes where the facility was located. I’ve spent dozens of hours poring over these ghosts, all the while filled with a curious mixture of nostalgia and, well, something that feels like wanderlust. I have no doubt, if a door to the past existed, I would be through it in a second.

Here in West Virginia there are many ghost fields, some remaining much as they were when the big X’s were painted on the runways. Other’s have become victims of urban sprawl and lie invisible, buried beneath concrete, steel and glass with only landmarks helping to identify their location.

Stewart Airpark, where I learned to fly in 1962 became a shopping mall sometime in the seventies. It was located in the city of Parkersburg, at the western edge of my state and it was one of the most beautiful and original of the airports that were built during the aviation tsunami that swept the nation after Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic.

When I was flying there in the early 60s, Stewart Airpark looked like a sepia photograph of an early English flying field. It measured 3,200 by 1,700 feet of well-drained and ancient sod, and there was a cross wind only if you wanted one, since you could land into the wind no matter which way the wind was blowing. I’ve since walked through the mall, trying to imagine the old airport under my shoes and wondering just where the spot was that I touched down on my first solo flight.

Another of yesterday’s airports near my home was Patton field near Clarksburg. When I was a boy and we traveled by car to the city, I was usually gifted with a few minutes stop by the road there, to gaze at the biplane which had been tied down and left to die. As the years passed I saw it progressively become more ragged and forlorn until one day it was gone, like the airport itself a few years later. This airport, which was built on one of the precious few level spots in the Simpson Creek area, became a golf course in the seventies. I remember my ire when they hauled in dirt to make it a rolling course.

Sometimes these ghost fields involve ghost airplanes, some rumored, some real. I once was told of an abandoned airport that was now second growth forest and still there was supposedly the skeleton of a J-3 that has been tied down and left. According to the rumor there was now a good-sized tree growing up through one wing. I was never able to spot it, neither the airplane nor the strip, despite many trips over the area.

I guess it’s the undiscovered airplanes from the past that give me the biggest thrill and, over the years, I’ve uncovered a few. I still own the 1939 J-3 that I found in a barn in 1969, stored since the early 50s, covered with the dust of the years and still painted with the scalloped wing leading edge that was de rigueur when the airplane was recovered in the 40s. 

I recently sold, for an estate, a Fairchild PT-19 that had been stored, wings leaning against a wall, inside an old skating rink. It had been purchased in the early 50s by a man who never learned to fly it, but who would taxi it around the rink’s parking lot, sans wings, taking his children for an airplane ride.

Even today there still exist, outside of museums, many artifacts of bygone aviation – sometimes hiding in plain sight. The Elkins airport beacon is a good example of this, because it is officially Airway Beacon #3589 and one of a few survivors of the United States Lighted Airway system. In the days before radio navigation, these beacons defined the airways across the United States and helped the U.S. Airmail pilots navigate the night skies. Airways across the U.S. were illuminated by these lighted beacons, more than 1,500 in all.  The beacons were installed on a 50-foot tower and they were sometimes placed near a large concrete arrow painted yellow and pointing the way to the next beacon. On a clear night the beacons could be seen up to 150 miles away depending on their size and weather conditions. 

The U.S. Air Mail Service had a short life, but the network of routes and the experience of the pilots played an important role in the development of commercial air service in the United States.  The beacons guided the air mail pilots safely across the country and signaled a major advancement in flight.