photos.nj.com/gallery/4504/Essex … nniversary
ESSEX – Guyon Nelson pulls out a folder of discolored newspaper clippings from a file cabinet, his own collection of memories from a storied airstrip.
“The good old stories,” said Nelson, the field manager of fixed base operations at Mac Dan Aviation at Essex County Airport.
One clipping dated 1980 tells the story of the “no-frills” 12-day, trans-Atlantic flight that West German Jaromir Wagner endured as he was strapped between the wings of a twin-engine plane and exposed to the elements. The flight, after a traditional circling of the Statue of Liberty, ended at the Fairfield airfield.
“He had bad frostbite,” Nelson said. “It was quite a spectacle.”
Today, Essex County’s general aviation airport is, at the age of 80, a place of stories as varied as the 283 aircraft – Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft – seated off its two runways. The facility, operated since 1975 by the Essex County Improvement Authority, also is home to three flying schools, and that sense of adventure that comes with flying.
Barry Landy is the chief instructor at Century Flight Academy, a Federal Aviation Administration-accredited school where some 50 students immerse themselves in 60 or more hours of study to get their wings.
“I’m going to do an engine run-up right now,” he said while at the controls of a Cessna Skyhawk II in a routine no doubt heard time and again by successive generations of aviators. "I’m checking the idle now. Now, I’m going to check my flight indicators. Vertical screen. Oil pressure. And if my alternator’s working.
“I have to turn on my transponder,” he said of the device that enables the control tower to identify the aircraft via radar. “Cleared for takeoff.”
The airport, on a one-time dairy, traces its beginnings to September 1929, when the airfield was opened. It would not have an official grand opening – or the accompanying air show – until Oct. 26, 1930, said Alex Davidson, a 62-year-old pilot from Blairstown who took his first solo flight at the airport in 1964.
Several years ago, Davidson, the grandson of a one-time aviation editor at the old Newark Star-Eagle, embarked on a journey to discover the airport’s early history, something he found lacking in libraries. Before long, he solved the mystery of one of the field’s early names, Marvin Airport.
“Nobody knew who Marvin was,” he said.
He unearthed an April 20, 1929, newspaper clipping headlined “Airport for Montclair assured by newly formed Essex aviation group.” The president of that group, Essex Airport Inc., was Walter Marvin, who lived at 184 Upper Mountain Ave., in Montclair and traveled widely to promote the creation of airports.
He also came upon a connection to Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” who in 1927 became the first aviator to make a solo non-stop trans-Atlantic flight – from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris – on the “Spirit of St. Louis.”
“Lindbergh looked to buy a house overlooking the airport,” he said.
The airport, too, had strong ties to the Curtiss-Wright Corp., evidence of which remains today in the strip’s call letters, CDW.
Andy Coppola, an aircraft engineer with C/W Aero Services, who had worked on experimental Curtiss-Wright aircraft, talked up the connection to Chuck Yeager, who in 1947 became the first man to break the sound barrier. The reaction motor rocket engines used in versions of the X-1 were tested at the airport, he said.
“They were so loud,” he said.
A decade ago, the airport gained notoriety on July 16, 1999, when John F. Kennedy Jr., who kept his Piper Saratoga at the airstrip, crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard and perished.
“He loved this airport,” said Andy Ferguson of Air Bound Aviation, where Kennedy housed his Saratoga. “He really felt like he was just a pilot. He had his privacy here and had his hobby.”
Last year, the airport made headlines in another way: A couple who had just landed in a small Cessna 172 were stopped in their rented 2007 Chevrolet Aveo on Fairfield’s Passaic Avenue, leading to the seizure of $4.7 million in cocaine and heroin.
Even today, airport workers say, Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning actor whose many roles included the dignified chauffeur in “Driving Miss Daisy,” flies in at the controls of a Cessna Citation 8-seater.
In recent years, the airport’s owner, the ECIA, has been busy modernizing the 278-acre airfield, reconstructing runways, building modern hangars, installing fencing to prevent run-ins with deer and adding security surveillance equipment.
“We’re in the black,” James Paganelli, the ECIA’s executive director said of an airport, where parking spaces run from $180 to $250 a month and hangars run $670.
Even today, there are still some relics around.
One is a post-war British Pembroke left at the end of the long-closed Runway 14 in the early 1980s amid hopes that it could be converted into a firefighter. Now, Thomas Gomez, the airport’s general manager, said it might wind up at an aviation museum if its wings are removed and taken on a flatbed.
“It’s definitely not going to fly,” he said.
Another fixture is Al Wityk, a 78-year-old former flight instructor and retired police captain from Little Falls. He can be spotted relaxing in a fold-up chair on a patch of green in the parking lot, looking as casual as someone on a beach.
“I just spend my time up there, reading, sunbathing,” he said. “I’ve been there a zillion years.”
To Gomez, an Air Force veteran, Wityk is a lot more.
“You ask him, my free security,” Gomez said
