Stapleton Memories

[jbDC9]

It never got to me. I actually miss the "pit".

mmm, "The Pit". Can I have an extra helping of grease please?

Personally, my favorite was the close in right downwind to 26R(or whatever the stubby E-W runway was) followed by the tight, dive bombing continuous turn to final... fun.

 

[dojetdriver]

Stapleton was a great airport, if for nothing else just the memories it gave me as an impressionable kid. My parents used to take my bro and I over to the perimeter fence as the jets were landing. Eventually security would come by and kick everyone out, but man it sure was a cool thing to see when you're a kid.

Ahhh, a fond memory indeed. Sometimes you would see people with couches in the back of their trucks, watching the sunset behind the mountains with a screaming airliner going overhead. I like how you could hear the wake whistle through the fence.

 

[NuGuy]

mmm, "The Pit". Can I have an extra helping of grease please?

That place had a hundered times the power of Medimucil. It was guarenteed to work within 4 hours to empty your entire digestive tract from your tonsils to your cornhole. Around our shop it was known as "colon blow".

Nu

 

[bobbysamd]

Stapleton

I grew up in Denver and took my first airplane flights and many thereafter from Stapleton. My first was around 1958. I was seven years old. My family took a trip to Scottsdale. We flew a DC-7 to ABQ and connected to a TWA Connie to PHX. I had been reading about airplanes since I could learn how to read and already knew about Connies. Actually flying on one was the coolest thing for a very youthful airplane enthusiast; in fact, upon reflection, flying on anything with round engines was cool.

I believe that Frontier was still operating DC-3s back then.

I remember one time when I was a child eating at the SkyChef restaurant at Stapleton. It was above the terminal. You could see the ramp. A DC-7 taxied in. It was painted in both CO and UAL livery. I never saw anything like it before or since. I cannot remember the exact term for when two airlines operate the same airplane (could it be "interlining?"), but learned about it many years later from reading AIM communications procedures.

It might have been the same evening when a Continental Vickers Viscount taxied to the ramp. That was also cool.

Finally, we lived relatively close to Stapleton and also under the short final of Lowry AFB's east-west runway. I grew up seeing many interesting aircraft for both fields.

Stapleton was a great airport, but the more it expanded the more it took on a Rube Goldberg look. Denver International was needed badly.