History
The airport was dedicated on 26 October 1945. The first scheduled commercial flights began in 1954. The terminal building constructed in 1960 was used until the present terminal was completed in 1987. By 1969, Willard had become the second-busiest airport in the state of Illinois. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, however, many airlines found service to a regional airport to be inefficient, the price differential to airfares from major hub airports such as Chicago O'Hare grew, which limited the growth of demand for tickets from Willard, lowered the market share within the state, and caused airlines to discontinue service in the ensuing decades.
On January 28, 1998, President Bill Clinton was in Champaign-Urbana for a speaking engagement at Assembly Hall and arrived at Willard Airport on Air Force One. Due to the breaking story, news media descended on Champaign-Urbana. After the engagement, just prior to takeoff, the Boeing 707 acting as Air Force One got stuck in the mud, the taxiway not being designed for aircraft as wide as the Boeing 707. After about an hour of being stuck, a backup Air Force One descended upon Willard Airport. The backup was SAM26000, which was the same 707 that took John Kennedy to Dallas. The trip on SAM26000 marked the last time it carried a sitting president. Several months later it was retired to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson. Many news broadcasts that evening carried live video feed of the Presidential aircraft stuck at Willard Airport.
Read more about this topic: University Of Illinois Willard Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)