The first terrorist attack on a national landmark after September 11, 2001, has occurred. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed, but the callousness of the act, perpetrated in the dark of night, by a ruthless, calculating, cold-blooded thug, was made more horrible by its far-reaching implications. The act, an assault on a place held dear by Americans, was carried out not by some alien to our shores in pursuit of a warped political agenda. The attack on one of our most revered aviation icons was not carried out by a crazed right-winger with a truck full of explosives. It was worse. It was effectuated by an American with no regard for our system of laws. It was carried out by the type of person that our president has sworn he will pursue and bring to justice, the type of person that even now our troops are fighting and dying to eradicate from this world, the terrorist dictator. The national landmark and treasure that is Meigs Field was attacked on the orders of "Da Mare," Richard Daley, of Chicago.Taking a leaf from the book written in blood and terror by the most heinous of gangs in U.S. history, the Ku Klux Klan, Da Mare sent his nightriders to demolish a place where inner-city black children were being taken on a regular basis to learn that there is a big world beyond the mean streets of Chicago and that they can dream of a better life. Mayor Daley the Terrorist arrived in the cold of night to cleanse a portion of his city of a minority that was not good enough to be there, pilots.It did not matter to Da Mare that aircraft had been an integral part of the Chicago lakefront scene for more than a hundred years, beginning with balloons and later, airplanes, flying from Grant Park. In the 1930s, recognizing the continuing value of aircraft to the vitality of the city and the enjoyment of its citizens, Meigs Field was built on land reclaimed from Lake Michigan for the Century of Progress Exposition. Even though it was an old airport, modern technology had converted it to a national landmark because it was the airport used in the most wildly popular computer flight simulator program ever created. Thousands upon thousands of people, pilots and non-pilots alike, who dreamed of flight and who bought the program, spent hours learning how an airplane flew and dreamed of someday flying to that bright, sunlit airport they saw on their computer screen, Meigs Field.Now, despite giving his word to keep the airport open, Daley not only closed Meigs, he did $500,000 damage to it in the process.In the aftermath of the attack on Meigs Field, I spent quite a bit of time in the Pilots Lounge, here at the virtual airport, talking with men and women who were devastated by Daley's tyrannical action. They took it personally, because Meigs long ago became the symbol for every small airport in this country that is under attack by closed-minded bureaucrats, anti-airport neighbors and greedy hustlers. One of the best descriptions I heard was from someone who had recently obtained his pilot certificate after using the Microsoft Flight Simulator program and was looking forward to his first long cross-country flight with Meigs as the destination. He said he felt just as he did back when he was in second grade. He had done chores around the house and carefully saved up his allowance over what he recalled as an extended time and was finally on the way to the store to buy the item he had longed for only to have the neighborhood bully beat him up and take his money. I couldn't think of a better description for how Daley's thuggery has affected those of us who work so hard for the hours we can spend in the sky and have sought flight for our entire lives. Beyond the vandalism to a runway and theft of our dreams, his reminder that a dictator is responsible to no one was a knife in the gut to thousands of pilots.I was pleased to see that the press was uniform in condemning Daley's terrorism. Even the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, himself a proponent of closing Meigs, on April 2, 2003, expressed his "horror that King Richard II would go about this surprise shutdown in a way that was so clumsy, so heavy-handed and so downright dictatorial." If that man, who has repeatedly written that only the hopelessly wealthy and elite use Meigs, and went on to claim in his April 2 editorial that the Friends of Meigs was merely a front for the "state government officials and lobbyists who use the airport as their private landing strip" can be critical of Da Mare, perhaps there is hope.I was quite moved by a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune on April 6, 2003, from David McDonald of Chicago. He lost his wife in the World Trade Center on September 11 and castigated Mayor Daley for having the temerity to equate the sneak closure of Meigs with protecting the people of Chicago from a terrorist attack.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/the-pilots-lounge-60daley-meigs-and-the-tyranny-of-small-minds