Airport turns a vigorous 40

Duck-hunting trip led to site selection, today's international facility

On the drive to the airport, Ed Mitchell takes the long way, through Swancott and a country lane known as Short Pike, the forgotten stretches of Madison County.

But this land of cinder-block shacks and red-clay fields littered with broken cotton stalks comes alive for Mitchell, as if he's seeing it again for the first time.

Mitchell drives his Cadillac through the vastness of western Madison County, past the country store he saw more than 40 years ago, when he was on the most important scouting mission of his career with the Huntsville Airport Authority.

Six years after he found this land on a duck-hunting trip, the airport, then known as the Jetport, opened on Oct. 29, 1967, a day of clear skies and high clouds, ideal flying weather.

Today, the airport, now known as Huntsville International Airport, celebrates its 40th anniversary.

"See that grove of trees?'' Mitchell asks, pointing from his Cadillac. "See that runway down there? That's the end of it.''

That's the end of a 12,600-foot runway, one of the longest runways in the Southeast. Just now, a jet is taking off from that runway, heading south toward the Tennessee River.

"See that plane?'' Mitchell says. "See, he's already taken off."

And the pilot hasn't needed even half of the runway.

"Why wouldn't this be a good airport location?'' he asks. "Try finding another location like this one.

"I don't care where it is. You're not going to find one."

'You-bet-your-life'

Try finding another location like the old airport off Airport Road in south Huntsville, a crackerbox of a facility where private planes parked along the runway.

It opened in 1940 as an auxiliary landing strip for Army training flights. By 1964, it was handling 125,000 passengers a year.

Because of the mountain and the rock quarry on the southern end of the airport, one veteran commercial pilot compared landings and takeoffs to "playing football in a bathroom.''

"The pilots referred to it as the 'you-bet-your-life airport,' " said Ray Jones Sr., chairman of G.W. Jones & Sons Consulting Engineers, the engineering firm that helped create the new airport. "So, something had to be done."

When plans for the new airport were announced on Dec. 20, 1963, Mitchell, then the chairman of the airport authority, vowed to have "the finest airport in Alabama and the Southeast."

He figured he had the land to do it. In Mitchell's view, the 3,500-acre tract was "created by God for an airport."

Ultimately, the airport field was named in honor of Jones' father, Carl, who died in 1967. The total cost of the original facility was $18 million, about $6 million more than projections.

"In the 121-year history of our firm,'' said Ray Jones, "the airport would be the highlight of our work."

Too far from town?

Construction on the airport began in the fall of 1964. The project involved 14 general contractors - seven from Huntsville, four from Decatur, two from Gadsden and one from Birmingham.

A hotel was planned. So were a golf course, tennis court and swimming pool, all unprecedented for an airport in the 1960s.

Contractors moved 5 million cubic yards of soil, installed 100 miles of underground cable to connect 1,000 aviation lights, installed 17 miles of storm pipe for drainage, laid more than 130,000 tons of asphalt paving, erected a 105-foot control tower, and laid more than 3,000 tons of stone.

There were also political struggles. People in Huntsville, including some city councilmen, didn't like the new airport being so far from downtown.

"Everybody said it was too far from Huntsville and too close to Decatur," Mitchell said. "I said, 'I'm going to have to start wearing a gun.' "

People in Decatur were also unhappy, as he recalled. The airport in Decatur, which handled about 4,500 passengers a year, closed after a Southern Airlines flight to Muscle Shoals on the night of Oct. 28, 1967.

With their airport closing, leaders in Decatur wanted to share the name of the new airport.

"They tried to call it the Huntsville-Decatur airport,'' Mitchell said. "We jumped on them about that.''

In Mitchell's estimation, the most pivotal battles were fought in Washington, D.C., by U.S. Rep. Bob Jones, D-Scottsboro, then the head of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee,

"I sat in this big room in the Capitol and nobody came in," Mitchell said. "Bob Jones finally walked in, and he didn't even acknowledge me. He started shuffling in his pocket. He said, 'I have these agreements.' "

The agreements, Mitchell said, was congressional approval to change federal matching funds for the new Huntsville airport.

Instead of receiving 50 percent federal funds, then the usual split, the airport would receive 90 percent federal funds.

"You know what (Jones) did?'' Mitchell said. "He hit the gavel and said, 'The bill passes.' "

Jones also was responsible for federal approval for another key move: Building the east and west runways 5,000 feet apart.

Such separation on the new, lengthy runaways allowed for multiple operations, even under the most serious weather conditions.

"Very few airports, very, very few, have that, even right now," Mitchell said. "People around the world know more what we've got than the people in Huntsville. What we wound up with was a major airport."