I didn’t know there was a movement afoot to shut down the Minden airport, but I’d have to agree with this opinion piece that it’s a “bad plan”.
I didn’t know there was a movement afoot to shut down the Minden airport, but I’d have to agree with this opinion piece that it’s a “bad plan”.
So, if a tower is added, planes will no longer fly over my house (or the noise will go away) even though it is aligned with the runway? I find that hard to believe. I guess if I lived in Genoa, I wouldn’t care much about the noise that the planes make…since you can’t hear them there. Howard…move to Johnson Lane area and you may change your mind.
I’m curious as to Howard’s interests in building a control tower…
I’m also curious as to the actual money that the airport brings in…and I’m not talking fluff money. I don’t want to hear things like, “Starbucks wouldn’t have built here if the airport wasn’t here…thereby making $3 million in taxes for Douglas County”. I would really like to see a line item breakdown of money going to the county. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not for the airport shutting down. However, we should know it’s true worth.
The airport has been there for a long, long time. Probably longer than your house. Everytime residential areas pop up around airports, comments like yours abound. You should have thought about the noise before you moved to Johnson Lane.
I live in Johnson Lane and I don’t even hear the airplanes. I don’t know who these people are that are bothered by them. But I know that the airport was already here when they moved here. My house has been here 30 years, but that’s only half the time the airport has.
I know that the low drone of a glider tow plane, or the sight of a fire bomber coming in to refill, are part of living in the valley, and I wouldn’t want to lose that.
Regarding previous comments and articles about the original Minden-Gardnerville Municipal airport. Perhaps some of your readers are not familiar with some of the earlier history of the airfield since it is often deleted from historical writeups. The following might provide some interesting background. I recently sent this to the airport manager’s office regarding their website.
“I am a retired/disabled veteran doing research for a book I am writing. I noticed that in the History section of your website for the airfield, you are missing several years and lots of information. Specifically 1949 to 1955. Is this on purpose due to the activities during that period or from lack on information?
Reference the two photos of the airfield probably taken some time after 1985. I have a close-up photo taken around 1953-1954 of the original hanger/office. and a follow-up photo taken in 1981. During that early period Bonanza Airlines serviced the airport with DC-3s with only one or two flights per month. However, the old teletype machine sitting in the corner of the “office” stayed busy as it also provided needed weather observations that were sent to the Nevada Test Site on the other side of the mountains. Along with refueling a wide variety of government/military aircraft the weather observations were duties of the airport manager who was also the Bonanza Airlines Station Manager. The top of the mushroom clouds could sometimes be seen just above the mountain range. On a few occasions wind-drift predictions were incorrect and radioactive fallout would drift into the Genoa area and the government would have to pay the citizens to compensate for dead sheep and cattle.
In the lower right corner of one photo you can see the faint outline of the original steel beacon tower and near its base was a small cement bathroom with two toilets.
Quite often a convoy of military sedans would arrive at the airfield and park out on the side of the runway next to a large Convair which was usually parked there for a few days. That plane belonged to and was occupied by a military aviation contractor by the name of Howard Hughes. When finished with his meetings he would walk over to the small travel trailer that the airport manager & his family called home. Hughes kept a customized DeSoto sedan parked by their trailer, and he would use that to drive up to a cabin at Lake Tahoe owned by his current girlfriend the movie star Ava Gardner.
There were 3 or 4 Air Force families living in house trailers positioned near the beacon. Their job was to examine and experiment with small captured German rockets & buzzbombs and develop the prototypes for our first generation of similar devices. ”
Dane Hays
16237 West Woodlands Ave
Goodyear, Arizona 85338