Last weekend the great folks, Marc, Al & Joby from Simpleflight Radio visited the Poplar Grove Airport to learn and share some of our story here with their listeners. Here’s a link to their podcast about our airport. Check out their other interesting interviews over the last several years…… all things aviation.
Click here to view the article and Listen to the PodCast.
POPLAR GROVE, ILLINOIS – The Poplar Grove Airport (C77) celebrated its 45th Annual Fly-In August 20 2017. An estimated 3,000 people attended the annual event featuring a great breakfast served by the local Lions Club. The beautiful sunrise and dawn patrol flight starring a group of vintage round motor aircraft started the day.
The rest of the morning was filled with many activities and displays from airplane rides, Flour Bombing Bingo sponsored by the local Rotary Club, airplane and automobile displays, vintage tractor pulls, museum tours, kids activities, EAA Chapter 1414 tours with demonstrations of a running Curtiss OX-5 engine and tours of the Poplar Grove Airmotive engine overhaul shop. The weather was perfect and the event was a huge success.
BELVIDERE — Welding torches blazed today so workers could free historic bowstring trusses from the former Manley Motors service bays and hoist them in the air to land delicately on a truck bed.
The steel trusses, weighing up to 4,000 pounds each, supported the roof of Manley Motors beginning in the 1930s, and they will be reused at Poplar Grove Airport.
Airport owner Steve Thomas intends to spend the summer repurposing the trusses into four 60-foot-deep hangars that will house up to 20 planes and remind visitors of an era when Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart flew the skies.
“We’ll stand them up, sandblast them, paint them and then build the hangars,” Thomas said. “We’ll see how it goes. They’re getting off to a rocky start.”
The crew realized they needed more gas for the torches soon after the work began at 621 S. State St., where the Manley family once sold Piper aircraft.
Weekend cabins are commonplace in the Midwest, but they typically involve lakes, not airports. However, there are many pilots who would rather get away to an airstrip for relaxation. It’s why the Poplar Grove Airport took a different approach to airplane hangar construction with the “Aviator’s Cabin.”
Poplar Grove Airport has been owned by Steve Thomas and his wife Tina since 1994, when they purchased it from Steve’s father, Dick. The Thomas family had built the airport back in 1972 – where it originally started as the family farm, as detailed in this article by General Aviation News.
Dick Thomas realized that Boone County, Illinois, did not have an airport. He converted the farm field into runways, and converted the cattle sheds into the airport’s first hangars.
Pilot Ken Starzyk flies his 1930 biplane over the grass landing strip at Poplar Grove Airport, to the delight of admiring fans. (Jon McGinty photo).
From its beginning as the first airport in Boone County, to being named the 2015 Best Private Airport in Illinois, Poplar Grove Airport has earned a unique reputation among aviators, both locally and worldwide.
Located on Illinois Rt. 76, a few miles north of Belvidere, Poplar Grove Airport doesn’t look like what we’ve come to expect at a modern airport. There are no cyclone fences topped with barbed wire surrounding the field, no air traffic control towers, no terminal, no armed guards, no commercial jets or corporate airplanes roaring off into the blue.
Instead, what you see are lots of hangars, several with a vintage look, and lots of small planes landing and taking off on the grass, some with two wings strung with wires, all propeller-driven; many are older than their pilots. Depending on the timing of your visit, you might see families with kids sitting in the grass watching the airplanes, or lined up to get a ride – many for the first time – into the beckoning sky. Welcome to the way flying used to be…aviation for the pure fun of it! [Read more…]
Silence…………………………………………….. nothing but the hum of my Continental O-300 and the wind rushing over my windscreen as the Earth creeps up beneath my feet. Just at that tranquil moment where separation between earth and craft seems infinitesimally close, my ear discerns the whine of the stall horn and the seat of my pants feels the mains start to roll.
The silence is broken by my scream of victory as I execute a perfect landing that is far too infrequent. The moment is short-lived as I clean up my bird, pour on the coals, and feel the wheels release their grip from the runway again…………and again, enter into the quiet.
This is how I spent my summer evenings back in the mid 90s, left turns in the sky over Belvidere Airport (C77) where radio calls are not required and where the thunderous silence of one and their machine can be enjoyed uninterrupted.
The real story here is how the airport evolved from a quiet airport with 30-40 aircraft to a thriving community with approximately 400 aircraft, 202 hangars, and 100 residential homes complete with runway access. [Read more…]
Orion Samuelson celebrates fifty-five years on WGN today. So we brought him on from his house while we were talking to Dean Richards so he could discuss his health and recovery from surgery. He’s doing great, so we looked back at Orion’s long, successful career at WGN. Thank you for the support of the Big O!
Congratulations Orion…..great friend of our Airport & Museum!
POPLAR GROVE — In the 1960s, the world was changing steadily. In the countryside of Boone County, things weren’t much different.
Side-by-side, dairy farmer Dick Thomas and his son, Steve, tended to cows and worked the land that had been in their family since the 1800s.
A fellow farmer came by to purchase an outbuilding from Dick in 1967. Rather than come up the lane in a pickup truck, he arrived in a small craft airplane, landing alongside the pasture.
“He took me up for a ride. I was 15. I said, ‘Ooh! This is it! This is a whole new world.’ And it seemed more exciting and more fun than milking cows, baling hay and shoveling manure,” Steve said.
From that moment forward, flying would become an instrumental part of his life. [Read more…]
