wombat@ccvaxa.UUCP (10/03/85)
About Sullivan- The 26-Aug-85 *New Yorker* has a long article by one Burton Bernstein on small airports. He and Ed Koren (the guy who draws the fuzzy people) visited several small airports in New England. Here is how he described Sullivan: [ Several years ago, when I was a student pilot, I made a cross-country training flight with my instructor, Dave Smith, to a destination with the impressive name of Sullivan County International Airport. This airport, situated in the heart of the Darkest Catskills, was, I had been informed by Dave, something to behold. "Weirdo, like something out of 'The Twilight Zone' -- wait till you see it," he said. Sullivan County International, he explained, was built in 1970 to handle an expected new generation of tourists to the Catskills resort areas, from all over the United States and (hence the "international" designation) Canada. It boasted a sixty-three-hundred-foot asphalt runway, capable of receiving all but the heaviest jet airliners, and it had sophisticated navigational devices, ticket counters, baggage-sorting rooms, even a United States Customs Office. The only trouble was that nobody showed up to take advantage of the extraordinary conveniences; the new generation of tourists came to the resorts, all right, but they arrived in their automobiles or by bus, as before. The slick modern air terminal, maintained impeccably over the years, became a rural monument to misguided dreams of glory -- in short, a bust, a fiscal flop. Everything Dave told me about the place was true. We were the only pilots who landed on its magnificent runway that November day in 1981. ] He then describes his and Ed's trip there in a 172 in 1983. Other airports visited are Duchess County Airport, Stormville, NY, Block Island, RI, and Post Mills Airport, VT. It's a good, interesting article that focuses on the people who operate these airports. Look it up. "When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all." Roger Zelazny, *Doorways in the Sand* Wombat ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!wombat