On Monday, September 29, I completed a lifetime quest of visiting all 50 states by chasing ghosts at Brunswick Executive Airport (BXM), the former Naval Air Station Brunswick Maine. I chose it because my late father, a naval aviator, served here as an SB2C Helldiver (below) pilot at the war’s end. In seeking the ghost of my dad’s aviation past I wandered unmolested with the ghost of aviation’s present and saw glimpses of what may be the ghost of aviation’s future.
The Navy commissioned NAS Brunswick in 1943, two years before my dad arrived with his squadron, which was transferred from NAS Fallon Nevada when the bomb made the invasion of Japan unnecessary. I didn’t take the time to explore each of its 1,487 acres, but I found no evidence from my father’s aviation era. The ghost of aviation present speaks with a loud silence on the airport’s parallel 8,000-foot runways and 103 acres of taxiways and ramps that were once covered with P2v Neptunes and then P-3 Orions. No one was flew during my afternoon sojourn, and the only airplanes I saw were two Cirrus SRs and four amateur-built experimental aircraft tied down around the the old Navy tower and ops building. The only people I ran into was the lineman/counterman at the FBO and a steady stream of moms and their offspring at the daycare center. This, I think, could be the ghost of aviation’s future.
[Read more…] about Chasing Ghosts at NAS Brunswick Maine
With no demands or duties, I retired to the deck on Father’s Day to reflect on my life’s journey, to appreciate the good times and bad that are its waypoints. A caressing breeze ebbed and flowed from the west like wind waves on the sky’s shoreline as I stared absently at an unseen stylus scribing a chalky white arc of vapor across a cloudless blueboard at 35,000 feet.