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Ultimate Issue: The Connection Between Airports and God’s Acres

There are many places where runways share space with cemeteries.

Members of the Dodson family, Daniel Hueston and John Dotson, are buried alongside Runway 10 at Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (KSAV). [Courtesy: Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport]
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Key Takeaways:

  • Many airports, from large international hubs to smaller regional fields, are surprisingly often built on or near existing cemeteries.
  • Airports handle these historical burial grounds in various ways, including relocating graves for expansion or incorporating them into the airport's design, sometimes even with graves located directly under runways.
  • The article highlights unique aviation memorials like the "Portal of the Folded Wings" at Hollywood Burbank Airport, which serves as a dedicated shrine and final resting place for aviation pioneers.
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Sitting in the Pioneer Cemetery on a knoll across the street from Lunken Airport in Cincinnati, I was thinking about cemeteries and airports (imagine that).

It is a lovely, peaceful spot set on a knoll, but most of the remains—people who went down the Ohio River and settled on the flat ground below in the late 1700s—were reinterred up here above the floodplain. That large, flat area, called the Turkey Bottoms, would become “Sunken Lunken” Airport in the early 1920s.

Martha Lunken

Martha Lunken is a lifelong pilot, former FAA inspector and defrocked pilot examiner. She flies a Cessna 180 and anything with a tailwheel, from Cubs to DC-3s.

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