The Greatest Airport Party Ever

Down-home Aviation at Its Best in the American Heartland

- Martha King

This normally nontowered airport was probably the busiest it had ever been. The airport needed to land an airplane about every minute and a half to accommodate the arrivals in the time available between sunrise and 10:30 a.m., when everyone wanted to be on the ground. The trick was getting everyone off the runway and into parking to clear the way for those behind.

The big show was supposed to be at 11:50 a.m., but John and I had a great time watching all the airplanes long before then. Every kind of airplane you could imagine was joining the party, from home builts to jets. And a great party it would be.

Nature would be providing us a rare show — a total solar eclipse. Over any given spot on Earth, a total solar eclipse occurs about once every 375 years. If John and I are ever to see another one, there will likely be an airplane involved — like there was this time.

We had read estimates that as many as 7.4 million people would compete with one another on the roads to get to the path of totality. We understood there would be traffic jams everywhere. No problem, we said. That’s where general aviation shines — we will fly.

Our plan was to wait and see what the weather looked like the day before the eclipse, then fly to wherever looked most likely to guarantee clear skies. And if the weather turned unexpectedly cloudy on eclipse day, we could fly somewhere else.

This sounded great in theory, but when we started investigating good locations for eclipse viewing we discovered that some airports had been taking aircraft parking reservations for the eclipse for years — and all expected to have to turn away airplanes. It became obvious that we needed to pick a destination airport and settle in.