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Greater Southwest International Airport
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Greater Southwest International Airport (IATA: GSW, ICAO: KGSW) was the commercial airport serving Fort Worth, Texas from 1953 until 1972. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (or DFW) opened in 1974 on property adjacent to the north side of the airport.
As far back as 1927, the cities of Fort Worth and Dallas had unsuccessfully proposed a regional airport that would serve the need of the entire metropolitan area. This did not come to fruition, and after World War II, Fort Worth decided to move its commercial aviation operations from Meacham Field to a new facility, Amon Carter Field. Fort Worth annexed a finger of land to the east, thus extending the city limits to encompass the new site.
American, Braniff, Central, Continental, Delta, Eastern, and Trans-Texas Airlines were among the carriers who operated from the airport, which had three paved runways and a rather elaborate terminal building (including gold-plated murals). However, the airport never reached its operating capacity, and saw its traffic steadily dwindle while traffic at Love Field continued to grow.
In 1960, the airport was renamed Greater Southwest International Airport in a failed attempt to try and increase passenger traffic.
During the mid-1960s, the Federal Aviation Administration, having grown weary of funding separate airports for Dallas and Fort Worth, announced it would no longer support both facilities. The Civil Aeronautics Board ordered the two cities to finally come up with a working plan for one jointly-operated regional airport. A parcel of land located directly north of Greater Southwest was selected for the creation of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. As soon as Dallas-Fort Worth International opened, the FAA closed the runways at Greater Southwest as a safety precaution to avoid unnecessary accidents.
On 30 May 1972, Delta Air Lines Flight 9570 crashed at Greater Southwest International Airport while performing "touch and go" training landings. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that wake turbulence from another training flight, an American Airlines DC-10, had caused the Delta DC-9 to lose control as it neared touchdown. As this was a training flight, only four people were aboard the flight 9570 at the time of the crash: three crew and an FAA operations inspector. All were killed.[1][2]
Following the closure of the airport, Runway 18/36 became Amon Carter Boulevard, and for several years the old runway served in this capacity before it was torn up and replaced with an actual street. Even today (as of 2006), a small section of the taxiway and run-up area of Runway 18 still exists on the north side of SH-183. American Airlines expanded its headquarters to new buildings on the airport site during the 1980s and 1990s (the airline's former hangar had remained in use as a reservations center for several years before it was finally demolished). The airport's IATA airport code, GSW, is still in use by the American Airlines Flight Academy, which sits across State Highway 360 from the former airport site.
- "Northeast Fort Worth Area". Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields. URL accessed on October 14, 2005.
- ^ NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, dated 13 March 1973, URL retrieved 25 February 2007
- ^ Job, MacArthur (1994). Air Disaster, Volume 1. Fyshwick, Australian Capital Territory: Aerospace Publications Pty Ltd, 79-87. ISBN 1875671110.