Airport Archeology

I have visited hundreds of closed airfields around the US and amassed a personal library  of thousands of charts, directories, and photographs pertaining to the history of aviation in America going back to the 1920’s. The results of this work are included in hundreds of articles pertaining the history of various airports. You can read about them at our abandoned airports website.

Thanks to Paul Freeman who is the site’s originator and editor for his encouragement and support over the years.


Small runways at BIG airports [STOL in America]

Updated! as of July 2022 SUMMARY There are a few articles and a bunch of blog posts, often full of factual errors, which talk about an interesting phenomenon that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s at major US Airports. It was an idea put forward as a way to add more takeoffs and […]


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Google Street View Oddity

I was recently doing some research on the airfields of the Southern Pacific. Much to my surprise I discovered that on the island of Ofu, it seems that for some reason the vehicle taking the Google Street View photos chose to drive down the active runway of the island’s little airport instead of on the […]


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Thinnest runway in america?

This is me lying across the runway at Ft. Bragg, California airport (82CL). Thankfully there’s plenty of grass on either side of this runway for the planes to land on, but the total width of the asphalt must be only about 12 feet wide! That would make it the thinnest runway in the US that […]


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Airport Archeology articles

For now, click on the link below to see some of the articles that I have written. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aairfields-freeman.com+westerling&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8


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