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As The Crow Flies
Embarking on a Car Search by Airplane by Kevin Ware
The area I live in Washington state was originally settled by people arriving by boat. Even the original native inhabitants got around almost exclusively using canoes. With generally calm sea conditions and a plethora of coves, bays and islands, waterborne travel at the time was not just convenient but often the only feasible option. The problem now is that what was handy back in the days of water travel is not convenient with today’s mostly road-based system. To compensate, there is a state-run ferry system plus four huge bridges. However, using this system is anything but fast or efficient. A typical ferry trip usually takes an hour, including loading and disembarking, and there is often a long wait time to board. The bridges funnel traffic to choke points which causes traffic to back up. This is all very time-consuming and awkward.
But, as it happens, there is a surplus of underutilized general aviation airports. Nearly every major town in the
18 • TWIN & TURBINE / September 2021
PHOTOS BY AUTHOR
Puget Sound area has its own rather large airport, with the size and runway lengths completely out of proportion to the actual needs of the locals. This unusual situation is because following Pearl Harbor at the beginning of World War II the U.S. Army decided an invasion from the sea by Japan might be imminent, so they went about building fighter bases up and down the entire Pacific Coast. As the crow flies, they were all spaced about 50 miles apart, which was the combat operational distance for fighters of the day. These airports all occupy huge squares of land and almost always have the standard triangular runway layout required in the day of tailwheel fighters flown by inexperienced young pilots needing to land into the wind.
In the Puget Sound area alone, there are seven of these airports within less than 40 miles of each other: Bellingham (KBLI), Burlington (KBVS), Arlington (KAWO), Port Angeles (KCLM), Bremerton (KPWT), Shelton (KSHN) and Olympia
