With AIN Media Group's Aviation International News and its predecessor Aviation Convention News celebrating the company's 50th year of continuous publication this year, AIN’s editorial staff is going back through the archives each month to bring readers some interesting events that were covered over the past half-century.
REWIND (May 2003): It has been more than a month since Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s midnight raid on the city’s Lakefront Airport, Meigs Field. By now, the story of the runway’s actual destruction is widely known. Daley has since recanted his statement that destroying the airport was a security move, virtually admitting that he destroyed it because he wanted to and because it was arguably legal to do so. Trying to move on after the stunned reaction of a community besieged in the middle of the night, general aviation interests now face the question, “Where do we go from here?”
FAST-FORWARD: The friction between Chicago authorities and Meigs Field had festered for more than two decades before then-Mayor Richard Daley ordered the construction equipment out on the GA field on the night of March 30, 2003, to carve giant Xs into its 3,899-foot runway under the cloak of night, rendering it virtually inoperable without proper prior notification to the FAA or even to the owners of aircraft that were parked at the airport at the time.
As early as 1981, we reported in AIN-predecessor Aviation Convention News that then-Mayor Jane Byrne’s attempt to shutter Meigs Field in March of that year was thwarted by pressure from the FAA, the Illinois governor, local pilot groups, and businesses. FAA administrator Langhorne Bond notified Byrne that the city had accepted FAA improvement grants most recently in 1976, which obliged it to operate Meigs Field as an airport at least until 1996. A chastened Byrne backed down but reiterated that her goal remained the same: converting the airport to parkland. In 1996, the city refused to renew the airport’s lease, but in the early 2000s a compromise was discussed that would have kept Meigs in operation for another quarter-century. In an event that will live in private aviation infamy, Daley’s actions provided an emphatic end to those negotiations and, in his words, spared the city from further court battles. The courts, citing the expiration of the FAA grants, ruled the city was within its rights to close the airport, and in 2006, Chicago paid $33,000 in fines to the agency as a result of its abrupt closure of Meigs. Today, Northerly Island, where the airport once sat, is parkland, with a concert/event venue occupying a portion of its footprint.
