The last couple of morning papers have talked about the fact that our local airport is moving to the old Air Force base down the road a bit from us. They’re scheduled to move this weekend. I find this a bit humorous for a number of reasons.
First of all, the terminal is going to be built this summer. Right now, there’s no airline terminal at the Air Force base/new county airport. You would think this would leave thousands of passengers stranded in the elements as they waited for their flight. But in reality, that’s not really a problem because there’s no passengers. That’s right, there are no commercial flights to our local airport that’s moving; the last commercial flight to the county airport was back in 2002.
It’s a good thing they finished the freeway to the old airport last year.
Earl and I live downwind from both the old airport and the Air Force base. The runway at the base is used by a variety of interests, including acting as a backup landing spot for the space shuttle, random acts of Woodstock and by an airliner maintenance facility. We have all sorts of airline-emblazened jets flying over our house at all hours of the day, so it looks like we live near a busy airport. It looks like we have people just pouring in and out of the new airport. American Airlines, Southwest, JetBlue, they go in and out of the new airport like crazy.
Except there’s no passengers on the planes.
And the planes are going in to get fixed. Because they are broken.
I wonder how the hotel at the old airport is going to stay afloat, since the non-existent commercials flights have been moved to the new airport.
Are they going to build a new hotel for the non-existent passengers?
I’m hoping the new digs bring prosperity to the local economy. It would be a nice change of pace around here.
