I don’t know whether it is the product of bravado, a case of whistling past the graveyard, or just a warped sense of humor, but it seems to me that there are an awful lot of airports named after people who died in plane crashes.
The undisputed champion in this category must be Oklahoma City; their primary airport is named for Will Rogers, and their secondary commercial airport is named for Wiley Post, who was piloting the plane in which Rogers died, and was also killed in the crash.
Atchison, Kansas, named their airport for Amelia Earhart. Although new evidence was supposedly found this past August, neither her body nor her plane have been found after 75 years of searching the South Pacific. Most reasonable people moved her from the missing to the dead category long ago, and it is safe to say that she died in a plane crash.
Love Field in Dallas was named for an army lieutenant who crashed his biplane in 1913 while practicing for his military aviator exam, and Chicago’s O’Hare was named for Charles O’Hare, the navy’s first WWII ace and a medal of honor winner. He was shot down over the pacific ocean in 1943.
I’m told that air force bases are typically named for pilots that crashed and died.
He did not get an entire airport, but when Houston dedicated terminal D at IAH, it was named for Mickey Leland, a local congressman who died in a crash in Africa.
New Orleans didn’t exactly name its airport for a dead guy, but its three-letter airport code is based on an early aviation accident.
John Moisant was an aviation pioneer, and founder of Moisant International Aviators, a flying circus that went barnstorming around the United States. In 1910, he caught by a gust of wind as he was attempting to land,was thrown from his Bleriot monoplane and landed on his head.
The airport retains its "MSY" identifier, derived from the airport's origins as "Moisant Stock Yards" the name given to the land where Moisant's fatal airplane crash occurred, and upon which the airport was later built.
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