Meigs Is Coming Back!

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The corner newsboy was hawking the morning edition with Dead End Kids enthusiasm, “Extra: Chicago To Reopen Meigs Field! War Against General Aviation To End!” Scooped, but willing to follow someone else’s possibly phony story, I tossed a Buffalo nickel with, “Keep the change!”

And, adjusting my fedora, flagged down a cab and ordered the driver to head back to 2003. Adding, “Step on it!” I’ve always wanted to tell a cabbie to do that. I believe there’s now an Uber app just for such Dashiell Hammett hard-boiled emergencies.

Rumors of reopening Meigs Field have wandered the GA landscape like deranged prophets ever since that shameful March night when His Highness Richard M. Daley (1942-2011; he can’t hurt us anymore) killed the lakefront airport in a pique of spite. But a new prophet has appeared in … well, not our midst but close enough. As separately reportedby The Chicago Sun Times and AOPA, a local politician, named Willie Wilson, has—for some weird reason, but these are weird times—made Meigs’ revival a mayoral race campaign issue, just below a marijuana tax—which users will totally forget to pay—and declaring GA Great Again (there will be caps).

Wilson might not be a hangar celebrity in Des Moines nor stand a Meigs’ Resurrection chance of winning the race (he’s run and lost before), but my Don Quixote optimism dreams impossible dreams. Remember the FAA’s proposal to raise the LSA gross weight limit from 1320 to 3600 pounds? Yeah, I fell for that one, too. I think my electric flying car will arrive before that regulatory tease is fulfilled. Still, hope springs, and I hope I’m wrong.

Wilson’s proposal to raise Meigs from the dead would do two things: 1) Satisfy a bunch of pilots who’ve never flown to Meigs but swear they would if it were reopened, and 2) Give Midwest DPEs a convoluted destination that would require penetrating every class of convoluted airspace over a really big lake. Michigan, I think … might be Tahoe.

My examiner had me plan a flight to Meigs for my commercial checkride. He then waxed so nostalgically about his days hauling passengers there in the 1970s that we blew through the allotted time for the oral and realized it was lunchtime, saying, “Let’s tackle the practical.” I passed. He had the pastrami on marble rye.

Meigs Field is the mythical lost city airport of General Aviation, our Atlantis, destroyed by an all-powerful evil lord with no respect for law. We regale our forced-to-listen grandkids about a Camelot time and place that once was—even though it really wasn’t, sorry—when general aviation was invincible. Every city—big and small, Republican or Democrat, Paper or Plastic—wanted its own airport, because airports brought the politician’s favorite four-letter word: Jobs.

The fact that one misguided, evil-minded, pond-scum-sucking politician could—with executive malice and near-total impunity—order bulldozers to vandalize runways and glorify his ego, horrified the sleeping pilot community … and probably gave a few distant city managers ideas about turning their own unloved runways into drag strips. Sandstone, Minnesota, comes to mind.

Despots know that if you commit cautious little crimes and misdemeanors, you’ll never win big. But, be bold, strike first, and the mighty forces of do-nothingness will come to your aid. Sure, we pilots harrumphed and pounded our collective chests, quoting John Locke’s treatise on bulldozers solely in tyrants’ grasps, plus vaguely worded federal regulations about closing federally funded airports without … without what?

Permission? Ha! Daley didn’t need no stinkin’ permission. He was the man behind the men behind the D-9 Cats. Unknown if any women were involved. Let it go, Jake, it’s Chicago. Meigs, like Moe Green before him, was dead; no witnesses, and we quit complaining. It was just business. Sure, the FAA wrote a stern letter, and Chicago taxpayers had to pay a fine, and Daley promised not to doze-up O’Hare or Midway. Both exist today. So, some small victory there.

I’ve tried and failed to tally all the small airports I’ve seen die. Three of my favorites that exist only in memory: Santa Cruz Sky Park, California, now condos; Ramapo Valley Airport, New York, buried beneath a COSCO parking lot and Morningstar (North Field, Iowa), today a gravel pit along I-80. All dead, and all from natural causes—the relentless suburban tide to bury GA by the vast majority of humans who don’t share our love of what to them makes no sense whatsoever.

So, the rebirth of Chicago’s Meigs Field? Could happen. As I’ve said, these are weird times. Cities are falling all over each other to lure Gajillionaire Jeff Bezos, who’s possibly a hologram, to “please gentrify us” with promises of taxpayer funding. But, before you dismiss such insanity, picture Willie Wilson’s unverified plan to reopen Meigs, not merely as a swell Sunday afternoon destination for Wisconsin Cherokee owners, but as the real Amazonian HQ2 with a new Amazon Field!

Yes, that deserves an exclamation point, because it’s bold thinking—unsupported by cumbersome facts—that’ll keep my dying ember of GA hope alive and weird. And to glean a line from one of the greatest aviation movies ever, Princess Bride, Meigs Field isn’t dead … it’s just “mostly dead.”

As I returned from 2003, the cabbie dropped me back at the corner, where the newsie was now hawking the late edition: “Extra: Chicago Donates Meigs Field To Amazon! GA To Enter New Golden Age!”

As I tossed him my last Buffalo nickel, the kid let it drop to the gutter and snarled, “Price is a dime, now, Mister.” And I realized there was a harsh edge to these weird times.

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