Stapleton International Airport - Decommissioning

Decommissioning

By the 1980s, plans were under way to replace Stapleton with a new airport. Stapleton was plagued with a number of problems, including:

• inadequate separation between runways, leading to extremely long waits in bad weather
• little or no room for other airlines that proposed/wanted to use Stapleton for new destinations (an example of this was Southwest Airlines)
• a lawsuit over aircraft noise, brought by residents of the nearby Park Hill community
• legal threats by Adams County, Colorado to block a runway extension into Rocky Mountain Arsenal lands

The Colorado General Assembly brokered a deal in 1985 to annex a plot of land in Adams County into the city of Denver, and use that land to build a new airport. Adams County voters approved the plan in 1988, and Denver voters approved the plan in a 1989 referendum.

After weeks of delays, a Continental Airlines flight, with a destination of London Gatwick, was the last flight to depart Stapleton. The airport was then shut down. A convoy of vehicles of many kinds (rental cars, baggage carts, fuel trucks, etc.) traveled to the new Denver International Airport (DIA), which officially opened for all operations the following morning.

The runways at Stapleton were then marked with large yellow "Xs," which indicated it was no longer legal or safe for any aircraft to land there. The IATA and ICAO airport codes of DEN and KDEN were then transferred to the new DIA, to coincide with the same changes in airline and ATC computers, to ensure that flights to Denver would land at the new DIA.

Originally Denver sought tenants for the terminal and concourses, but these buildings proved ill-suited for alternative uses. A July 1997 hail storm punched roughly 4,000 holes in the roofs of the old terminal and concourses, causing severe water damage, which compelled the city to tear them down. However Stapleton's 12-story control tower will be retained as a monument to the airport's history and is likely to have an added observation deck for tourists.

All of Stapleton's airport infrastructure has been removed, except for the former control tower. The final parking structure was torn down to make room for the "Central Park West" section of the housing development in May 2011.