Midway Airport: The First Seventy-Five Years |
by Christopher Lynch Lake Claremont Press |
Back on the tarmac on our clockwise tour of Midway, our van now drove past the fuel farm that was once used by Midway Airlines, and manned by Monarch fuellers. Brendan, who had worked as a fueller off and on from High School through college waxed nostalgic as he looked at this area. "Ah yes," he sighed, "I remember all the fun fuel spills we had here." He recalled one incident, where a novice employee, just learning how to fill a fuel truck, wondered why jet fuel was gushing like a fountain from the top of his truck. The reason, as every fueller learns, is that some of these trucks have manual shut offs. So, if one is pumping three thousand gallons of fuel into the truck, one must climb to the top of the truck and open the hatch above. Then, from peering into the tank, one can see the fuel slowly seeping upward, towards the hatch. At the right moment, the fueller shuts the pump off.
In the van, we moved on from the fuel farm and memories of fuel spills and potential disasters, and rolled past two large concave hangers, now leased by Southwest Airlines, the successful former Texas intra-state carrier which carefully built a successful operation since airlines were deregulated in the late 1970's. However, Southwest wasn't the first low fare airline to use these two large hangers. For this was once the headquarters of Midway Airlines.
Midway Airlines, which had begun operations at Midway shortly in 1979 with one plane, was the beginning of the Renaissance of the airport. Since the emergence and domination of O'Hare, Midway had begun a slow decline, which explained the weeds in the tarmac, and a terminal that was a ghost town. During those lean years, it was student pilots and corporate customers that kept the airport alive.
Yet Midway Airlines, in the early days, was a grand experiment that almost failed. In the early months, they had no money, and were just trying to stay alive. It was Monarch that helped aid them, with fuel when they had no money, and my father had a vision of what could happen to the airport if operations like Midway Airlines came in. He felt that if this airline made it, then there might be others.
And that is what indeed happened. Midway Airlines got on their feet, and became extremely successful, virtually turning Midway's empty terminal to a lively place, filled with thousands of passengers flying all over the country. With Midway Airlines success, other airlines took notice, returning to Midway, where many of the carriers had begun fifty years before.
But alas, Midway expanded too quickly, and added a Philadelphia Hub that overextended its capital. In 1991 Midway Airlines filed for bankruptcy.
Continue the Tour: Old Terminal