Munedawg Communications

Recently I visited a local municipal airport, Gardner Municipal Airport in Massachusetts to be precise, and it was a wonderfully surreal experience, well to me at least; even a trip to a local sandpit is terribly exciting to me! 😀 (I don’t get out much!)

Gardner Municipal Airport is actually located in the town of Templeton, Massachusetts, which has a rich and varied past. Well, actually it doesn’t but I’ll pretend that it does. 🙂

In the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) naming system “K” signifies the contiguous United States and “GDM” is the FAA’s identifier for this airport.

When I arrived I already noticed how quiet the place was.

It’s true that I was there on a Friday and probably it gets busier on the weekends, but it did seem kind of desolate, which weirdly isn’t a total bad thing since it reminded me of one of my favorite The Avengers episodes, “The Town of No Return” (1965), actually the first Diana Rigg “Emma Peel” episode.

In the episode Emma and John Steed travel to the seaside town of Little Bazeley in which there are strange goings on (as usual in an Avengers episode) in which people keep disappearing. They stay at the local inn which is presided over by a gregarious landlord by the name of “Piggy” Warren, a former RAF chap, or so it seems at first. But it turns out that the nightly “badger hunting” is a man/woman hunt in which the former inhabitants of the town are hunted down and killed. In a wonderful sequence at a former RAF WWII era airfield they discover that the actual Piggy Warren was killed in action in the war.

And even the overcast weather at the airport reminded me of of some of the UK weather prevalent in the series.

And actually is was an educational experience for me as well. I saw some intriguing signs on the runway, one with a black “A” on a yellow background and one with a yellow “B” on a black background. In doing some research on the web I discovered that the “A” sign refers to the runway itself and the “B” sign refers to the taxiway. This airport has only one runway and one taxiway but I thought it was still rather clever.

There were several buildings at the airport and actually 10 gates! I am assuming this is the main building…

And it seems like this intriguing aquamarine colored building was once the main administration building, but has sort of been abandoned but with some parts of it still in use.

Actually by the looks of some of the dates on the material in the office it appears it has been abandoned for 20 years! More shades of “The Town of No Return”! 🙂

And on that day I only saw one airplane, which was just sitting there!

All in all a fun trip to a strange desolate place! 😀