The article in the Friday, Sept. 22 edition of the Mirror titled “Aiming High” fails to relate the whole story of the airport.

The airport was originally at the end of Spring Street on the right hand side in Martinsburg.

It was there until it was relocated further out of town. Planes taking off from the old location flew over Memorial Park and landed from the eastern side of the airport.

My cousin’s husband, Arthur Hibbs, worked at the old airport location as the Chief Airways Facilities Sector at the Federal Aviation Administration and my cousin, Edward Gfrorer, Arthur’s stepson,was the youngest pilot to get his pilot’s license at the old location.

My father used to take my mother, sister and me to get ice cream at Ritchey’s Dairy and then go to the old location of the airport and watch airplanes come in and take off.

They were mostly small planes because the airport was on the very edge of town. Our trips to the old airport location were always fun.

We could stand at the fence and watch passengers disembark from the plane back then.

In 1959, the construction was underway to move the administration building to the current location and lengthen and expand the runways.

I attended the dedication with my mother and my sister of the current airport’s location on Sept. 17, 1960.

The Blue Angels performed their air acrobatics at the airport’s dedication along with some other aerobatics flyers.

I have since flown in and out of the Altoona-Blair County Airport numerous times to connect on flights from Pittsburgh to Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Missouri.

I could have never flown out of the old one on the Lear jet to Iowa or the commuters that I have taken to Pittsburgh.

Living on a farm approximately a mile or two from the current airport location afforded us the ability to watch planes circling the airport to land and also to see them gaining altitude after take-off and travel west across the sky over our farm.

There are some other very interesting facts involving the old airport locations in Blair County that are not general knowledge unless one attended the dedication of the new location.

The homecoming of Major Wilmer Lower Stultz to Altoona and Williamsburg, was accompanied by Amelia Earhart and Lou Gordon, mechanic on her transatlantic flight. Amelia Earhart officiated at the dedication of the Stultz field in Tipton.

In May 1953 and in July 1954, then President Dwight Eisenhower used the old location while on a vacation in 1953 and landed again in 1954 to attend the funeral of his sister-in-law, wife of Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower.

There is a wealth of history in the Blair County airport that began in the late 1920s with several landing fields in Blair County and eventually ending with Martinsburg as the permanent location.

Gwen Black

Hollidaysburg