Stapleton International Airport

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Stapleton highlighted on this map of Denver's neighborhoods.

Stapleton International Airport was Denver, Colorado's primary airport from 1929 to 1995. At different times it served as a hub for TWA, People Express, Frontier Airlines and Western Airlines as well as a hub for Continental Airlines and United Airlines at the time of its closure. In 1995, Stapleton was replaced by Denver International Airport. It has now been decommissioned, and redeveloped as a neighborhood.

1 History
2 Decommissioning
3 Facilities
4 Redevelopment
5 Incidents
6 External links
7 References

[edit] History

Former Stapleton International Airport from the air (6 February 2006)

Stapleton was opened on October 17, 1929 as Denver Municipal Airport, which was later renamed to Stapleton Airfield after expansion in 1944. The renaming was in honor of Benjamin F. Stapleton, the city's mayor most of the time from 1923 to 1947, and the major force behind the project when it began in 1928. Concourse A, the original building from 1929, still was in operations when the airport closed. The airport was originally created by Ira Boyd Humphreys in 1919.

The facility received a new jet runway and terminal building in 1964. After deregulation, three different airlines operated large hubs out of Stapleton (Frontier Airlines, Continental Airlines, and United Airlines), leading to large levels of congestion. In order to combat the congestion, a new runway was added (18/36) in the 1980s and the terminal was again expanded. Concourse D was built in 1972, and Concourse E was built in 1988. At the time of its closure in 1995, Stapleton sported six runways (2 sets of 3 parallel runways) and five terminal concourses.

In 1982, the inaugural flight of the Boeing 767 landed at Stapleton, after a flight from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.

The airport scenes in the film Die Hard II were filmed at Stapleton.^[1] One scene of The Shining was shot there as well.

Stapleton Airport was the subject of studies by Ted Fujita about microbursts.

[edit] Decommissioning

By the 1980s, plans were underway to replace Stapleton with a new airport. Stapleton was plagued with a number of problems, including:

inadequate separation between runways, leading to extremely long waits in bad weather
little or no room for other airlines that proposed/wanted to use Stapleton for new destinations
a lawsuit over noise, brought by residents of nearby Park Hill community
legal threats by Adams County to block runway extension into Rocky Mountain Arsenal lands.

The Colorado General Assembly brokered a deal in 1985 to annex a plot of land in Adams County into the city of Denver, and use that land to build a new airport. Adams County voters approved the plan in 1988, and Denver voters approved the plan in a referendum in 1989.

On February 27, 1995, the last commercial flight left Stapleton (a Continental Airlines flight to London Gatwick). Stapleton was closed later that evening, and a massive convoy of all airport vehicles (everything from baggage carts to rental cars) headed for DIA, which opened the following morning. Yellow "X"'s were placed across all Stapleton runways to keep aircraft from landing at the now-closed airport. DIA dropped DVX and KDVX as its temporary airport codes, adopting Stapleton's DEN and KDEN. Visitors to Denver at this time had the experience of flying out of a different airport as the one they arrived at, although the airport had the same code.

All of Stapleton's airport infrastructure has been removed except for the control tower and a parking structure which remain standing as a reminder of the site's former days. This parking structure provides shuttle service to DIA.

[edit] Facilities

At the time of its decommissioning, the airport had the following runways [2]:

18/36 (7,700 ft)
17R/35L (11,500 ft)
17L/35R (12,000 ft)
7/25 (4871 ft)
8L/26R (8599 ft)
8R/26L (10,004 ft)

The old airport terminal had five concourses [3].

Concourse A (Commuter flights, Mesa Air Group, United Airlines)
Concourse B (United Airlines)
Concourse C (Continental Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Mexicana Airlines)
Concourse D (Trans World Airlines, MarkAir, Delta Air Lines)
Concourse E (Northwest Airlines, American Airlines, Sun Country)

[edit] Redevelopment

While Denver International was being constructed, planners began to decide how the Stapleton site would be redeveloped. A private group of Denver civic leaders, the Stapleton Development Foundation, convened in 1990 and produced a master plan for the site in 1995, emphasizing a pedestrian-oriented design rather than the automobile-oriented designs found in many other planned developments. Nearly a third of the airport site was slated for redevelopment as public park space.

The former airport site is now being redeveloped by Forest City Enterprises as the largest new urbanist project in the United States. Construction began in 2001, and as of 2004, over a thousand homes have been built on the Stapleton site. The new community is zoned for residential and commercial development, including office parks and "big box" shopping centers. Stapleton is by far the largest neighborhood in the city of Denver and an eastern portion of the redevelopment site lies in the neighboring city of Aurora.

Eventually, Stapleton is expected to be home to at least 30,000 residents, four schools and 2 million square feet (180,000 m²) of retail.^[2]. Northfield Stapleton, one of the development's major retail centers, recently opened.

[edit] Incidents

Several major air crashes involved Stapleton as the origin airport, with three actually occurring at Stapleton. Additionally, a United DC-8 was destroyed after landing at Stapleton.

On November 1, 1955, United Airlines Flight 629, a Douglas DC-6B airliner, exploded over nearby Longmont, Colorado while en route to Portland, Oregon from Stapleton, killing all 44 persons aboard. A man named John "Jack" Gilbert Graham was found to have planted a dynamite bomb in a suitcase that was loaded onto the plane in order to murder his mother in revenge for the way he was treated by her as a child. He was executed two years after Flight 629 exploded.
On July 11, 1961, United Airlines DC-8-12 N8040U was destroyed after landing. Asymmetric thrust on the numbers 1 and 2 engines forced a loss of control on the runway. The aircraft ended up striking a maintenance vehicle, killing the occupant. In the ensuing disaster, 17 of 122 occupants on the DC-8 perished.
On August 7, 1975, Continental Airlines Flight 426 crashed due to windshear after taking off and climbing to 100 feet on runway 35L. Fortunately, nobody was killed in the accident.
On November 16, 1976, a Texas International DC-9 Series 10 aircraft stalled after takeoff at Denver Stapleton International Airport and crashed. The 81 passengers and 5 crewmembers escaped but with 14 injuries.
On December 28, 1978, United Airlines Flight 173, which took off from Stapleton, ran out of fuel circling near Portland, Oregon, while the flight deck investigated landing gear problems. The aircraft ran out of fuel after the crew decided to "go-around" one more time prior to landing. Ten people died while 179 survived.
On November 15, 1987, when Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a Douglas DC-9-14 jetliner, crashed on takeoff during a snowstorm. The probable cause of the crash was the failure of the flight crew to have the aircraft de-iced prior to take-off and the over-rotation of the aircraft on take-off. Twenty-eight people were killed, while 54 survived.
On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10-10, crash-landed at the Sioux City, Iowa airport on a flight which originated at Stapleton. Flight 232 experienced a catastrophic engine failure over Alta, Iowa on a flight to Chicago, Illinois. One hundred and eleven people died in the crash, while 185 survived.
On March 3, 1991, United Airlines Flight 585 was on final approach to Colorado Springs Municipal Airport from Stapleton Airport when the 737 spun out of control. All 20 passengers and 5 crew were killed.