Allentown's Queen City Airport, with an ironic twist, could lose runway

March 03, 2012|Paul Carpenter

History is filled with ironies.

Early in World War II, America decided it needed Allentown's Mack Trucks plant to help build components for B-24 bombers and other warplanes, which then could destroy the transportation systems and other infrastructure of Germany and Japan.

As part of that plan, an airfield was needed and "Convair Field" was constructed. Convair was previously known as Consolidated Vultee and Vultee Street still runs from Lehigh Street into what is now Queen City Municipal Airport. That war ended before the facility could contribute much, but U.S. warplanes did blow up just about every rail line or other artifact that helped keep the Axis powers in operation.

Michael Rosenfeld was just a toddler in Allentown when all that happened, although he later became an Army helicopter pilot, retiring in 1992 as a full colonel. Recently, he visited Germany and saw what a splendid transportation system, including railroads and highways, that country has built.

War has a benefit. It can force a nation to rebuild infrastructure. In unscathed nations, once infrastructure is allowed to deteriorate or is deliberately destroyed, it is gone forever. Many people say how wonderful it would be if the Lehigh Valley could once again have the passenger rail service it once enjoyed — but it would take World War III to motivate us to rebuild the tracks.

Rosenfeld is now president of the Lehigh Valley General Aviation Association and he feels Queen City is one of the best general aviation (as opposed to commercial airline) facilities in America.

He finds painful irony in the fact that infrastructure, originally designed to help ravish an enemy's infrastructure, is now in danger of being ravished itself — not by enemy bombers but by local politicians who want to gain a fleeting influx of revenue by forsaking profound long-term benefits.

As The Morning Call reported Wednesday, Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, a member of the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority (which runs Queen City and Lehigh Valley International Airport), favors an idea that would destroy one of Queen City's two runways. An Atlanta developer, the story said, offered $16.2 million to use its land to build warehouses and other ventures. Rosenfeld was quoted as saying the elimination of the "cross-wind" runway would make landings at Queen City more dangerous, if not impossible at times, forcing more pilots to use LVIA instead.

So I went to see Rosenfeld at Queen City and one of the first things he pointed out was that diminished general aviation facilities in the Philadelphia area have affected Philadelphia International Airport. Among other problems, large airliners get stuck behind lines of small planes on taxi ways, resulting in delays that are sure to get worse with each passing year. If Pawlowski gets his way, that may be the future of LVIA if traffic there increases substantially in coming years.

Rosenfeld would love to see development at Queen City, but it should enhance the vitality of aviation. Warehouses, on the other hand, do nothing for local vitality except to increase truck traffic, which thus destroys another infrastructure, roadways.

Currently, he said, an impediment to beneficial development is city hall itself. The city hogs much of the airport's acreage while paying little for it, and the city lease is up for renewal in April. To illustrate that point, he showed me an ugly junkyard the city runs at the airport, filled with dilapidated or wrecked cars, including old police cars, that have been sitting there for years.

Rosenfeld said that Pawlowski has threatened to deny fire protection to the airport if he does not get his way on the other issues. That's a scary idea. If a politician does not like it when somebody bucks him, he can threaten to let that person's property burn down in retaliation?

(I tried to get Pawloski's take on all this, but his press aide did not get back to me.)

Pointing at the north-south cross-wind runway (the main runway is east-west), Rosenfeld said destroying it "would be very detrimental to the future growth and especially the operation of Queen City Airport. … You would be able to use the [main] runway only when the prevailing winds are blowing from the east or the west. ... Once you close the airport or diminish its capacity, it's gone forever."

This facility began as part of a war effort to destroy enemy infrastructure, and it was that destruction that forced those countries, over decades, to build infrastructures that now are better in many ways than ours.

To sabotage our own infrastructure, in return for a quick buck, is beyond ironic. 610-820-6176

Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

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