December 28 - Walt Disney World Airport

Image courtesy of themouselets.com

On this day, in 1972, the last scheduled flights landed on the runway of Walt Disney World’s airport. That’s right, there was (and technically still might be) an airport on the property of the Florida Project located right next to the Magic Kingdom parking lot. The single airstrip is what is known as a STOLport. Those capital letters are an acronym for Short Take-Offs and Landings. In the early Seventies, the FAA was looking at the feasibility of creating hundreds of tiny airports around the country where small planes (we’re talking almost exclusively prop planes here)could make short trips, thus freeing up some of the congestion at large airports and on the nation’s highways. One STOLport was even considered for the top of a building in New York City. Disney naturally wanted in on the action.

Image courtesy of markey.bangordailynews.com

A single 2,000 foot long airstrip was built with enough space to park four planes. No actual hangar space was ever constructed and no cushy terminal ever existed. In spite of the Spartan accommodations, the airport actually saw quite a bit of action, albeit for a short period of time. Opening in October of 1971, the STOLport welcomed regularly scheduled guests from both the Tampa Airport and the Orlando Jetport at McCoy Air Force Base (now known as Orlando International). An outfit called Shawnee Airlines would land with a DHC-6 Twin Otter puddle jumper full of guests, drop them off and take off again to get more. The flight from McCoy was about 15 minutes (which, depending on how bad traffic is today, sounds fantastic). Eastern Airlines listed it as an extension option for fliers coming into Tampa and Orlando. Commercial planes weren’t the only ones to use the airport. VIP guests and celebrities would also frequently start their Disney World visits by stepping out of their private Cessnas onto the tarmac at the STOLport.

Image courtesy of micechat.com

The tiny airport, however became the victim of a perfect storm of problems. First, the company hoped to build an actual airport within a few years down around where the Animal Kingdom is now. That’s part of the reason no real facilities were ever built at the STOLport. They’d just need to be torn down when the real project took shape. However, the oil crisis heated up and company officials quickly realized that an operation that required a steady stream of fuel might not be a great idea. The FAA also deemed STOLports to be unfeasible (which means that roof top one never got past the planning stages unfortunately). Then Disney executives famously lost their nerve all together over most things, began to worry about the liability of plane crashes, couldn’t get any airlines to agree to help pay for it and pulled the plug. A little over a year after flights began, they ended.

Image copyright Disney

Over the remainder of the Seventies, there would occasionally be a plane that landed on the WDW airstrip but they became fewer and farther between. When construction began on EPCOT Center and the new monorail line was put in, coming really close to one end of the tarmac, they stopped altogether. When Walt’s personal plane, Mickey Mouse One, was flown in to be displayed at the Disney-MGM Studios in the late Eighties, it had to land on World Drive. Even though the FAA listed the airstrip as active well into the nineties, it hasn’t been anything more than a holding area for buses for over three decades now. And with all the new construction that’s been going on lately in that area of the World, I’m not even sure it still exists. But if it does, and you find yourself riding the monorail between Epcot and the Transportation and Ticket Center, you can now turn to your fellow passengers and say “Did I ever tell you the one about the Disney airport?”