KIGX HORACE WILLIAMS !IGX 05/007 IGX AD AP CLSD 1805150500-PERM

IGX 05/007 IGX AD AP CLSD 1805150500-PERM

That is the FAA NOTAM announcing the end of an era.

In the dark of night tonight, Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will close permanently.  The reasons are complicated, having to do with decades of conflict between the university and the town, the town and the county, the legislature and the University of North Carolina, and political ambitions and personal enmities that have buffeted its existence for decades.  I lived with those shifting threats and spoke against them many times over the years. I have been angry and frustrated by the idiocy of all parties and will grieve as I watch the university figuratively plow up the runway in the manner of Mayor Richard M. Daley and Meigs Field, the storied airport on Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. This time, after many trips to the brink and back, the X that signifies closure will finally and permanently fall on runways 9 and 27 at W52.  I am weary of my anger and will live with the sadness. Tonight, I simply want to cherish the memories.

The origins of Horace Williams airport date to the late nineteen-twenties, when Charlie Martindale purchased fifty acres of land from Horace Williams, a long-time professor at the University of North Carolina.  Martindale Field became Chapel Hill Airport and in 1931 was recognized as the second official airport in North Carolina.

Photo courtesy of the Chapel Hill Historical Society.  For others from the 1930s …

Flight training has always been a part of Horace Williams.  After a much larger, adjacent parcel of land was bequeathed to the University by Horace Williams and combined with the original Chapel Hill Airport to become Horace Williams Airport, it served as one of five elite U.S. Navy Pre-Flight schools and by the end of World War II had been the training site for more than eighteen thousand flight cadets, thousands of whom never returned from the war.  By 1943 it had become the nation’s largest collegiate airport.

Horace Williams has been an important part of my life since childhood.   I spent many happy days there, learned to fly there as a young man, taught many people to fly off of that runway, and made there many enduring friendships.  Today I share memories of that green field with numerous of those friends who remember it as fondly as do I. A long and storied history will vanish with those 600 acres of grass. Those of us who learned to fly there feel a kinship with the hundreds or thousands of others who likewise earned their wings there over the years, a lineage that goes back to its service as a U.S. Navy flight training ground for George H.W. Bush, reputedly, John Glenn, Gerald Ford, Ted Williams and hundreds of lesser-known World War II pilots. A largely forgotten story is that of the Cloudbuster Nine, a semi-pro baseball team formed in 1943 among some of the Naval cadets who trained at Horace Williams.  The roster included Ted Williams, Johnny Sain, and Johny Pesky.  The team’s history and the larger story of those that trained at Chapel Hill is told in The Cloudbuster Nine by Anne R. Keene.

There are so many reasons why the loss of this airport – and others of its ilk – is a tragedy.  On my flight around the world in 2016 with my friend Adam Broome, we often remarked that nowhere else in the world does one find the freedom to fly we take for granted in the United States.  The infrastructure that is both the product of that freedom, the many small community airports in the farm fields of the Midwest, the mountains and backcountry of Idaho, and the barrier islands of the east coast, both the product of that freedom and the platform that sustains that freedom to fly, is threatened even here.  And the loss of a field such as Horace Williams, with its history, its interweaving with the most memorable, tragic, and glorious events of the last century, its role in aviation history and in the lives of so many of us who realized our dream on its ground, is tragic.  Why that is so is a topic for another day.  But it is so.

We fought for that airport for decades and now can only try to express our feelings for its place in our lives and the era which comes to an end tonight.

And this one is personal.

Those of us who flew out of W52 (the old identifier for Horace Williams) for many years have a deep affection for the place and its closing feels like a death in the family.  My daughter took her first airplane ride out of Horace Williams when she was about four or five.  Although I fly nearly every day, my kids never had an opportunity to fly in their earliest years.  One summer afternoon, we were at Horace Williams visiting our friend Bob Epting, he of the thousands of Young Eagle flights, who offered my daughter Kate a ride in his Cub.  Bob is on the very short list of pilots whom I will trust with my children, then and now, so up she jumped and up they went.  I will never forget watching her circle the field in the beautiful yellow Cub, window down, door open, waving to me on the ground.  Fearless and exuberant and tasting flight for the first time, in its purest form.  No photograph remains to commemorate the event, but some moments in life are iconic, so much a watershed moment that they exist in personal legend, inscribed in shared memory, burnished by the retelling.

I took my kids Friday evening to the now nearly deserted airport that had meant so much in my life and in theirs and, with the help of our friends Bob Epting and Tim Farris, sent them each for a ride in a Cub on what was a beautiful, warm spring evening, recreating that first flight by my daughter ten years ago.

After our circuits of the field in the Cubs, Kate and Ranen and Bob and I retired to the wooden bench on the deck overlooking the field and shared peanut butter sandwiches as we had many times in their childhood and we watched as darkness fell on the field.  John Shearer and a few other old denizens of the field dropped by unplanned to share the bench with us and reminisce about the colorful compatriots we remember, those who once lived and breathed and flew here and have since flown west, and the ghosts that still wander in and out of the old tin hangar on misty nights.

Addendum:  On Monday evening, the last Cub lifted off of runway 27 at Horace Williams for the last time.  The AWOS had been disabled. The clearance delivery frequently to RDU TRACON, 126.5, had fallen quiet.  How many times had I picked up my clearance from that remote transmitter.  But in the fading light Bob Epting and Tim Farris put the finis to ninety years of reaching for the sky from this hallowed ground. 

The words of the barkeep at last call, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”  And so, in the fading light, the Cubs disappeared into a painted sky, never to return.  Fitting, that an airport dating from the late nineteen-twenties was put to bed by the J3 Cub, the iconic airplane of early aviation.  This field, which has been home to every airplane from the barnstormers of the thirties to the most modern turbine power, was given its last kiss by the famous yellow tube and fabric, wood and wire, Piper Cub.  Flight in its purest form.

And then, nothing was left of all those years, all of those characters, all of those adventures.  Just a dark night, an eerie ramp, and the ghosts of aviators past retreating into the shadows. And then, as aviators do, we took those ghosts in our arms, shoulder to shoulder, and retreated to be among the comfort of our companions,  eating and drinking and reminiscing.  Letting go of the anger and the sadness and telling stories of better times and those with whom we had shared them.  After all, when all is said and done, the pistons cease their clatter and the turbines cease their roar and only the memories are left in the bottom of the glass.