Maintaining Turf Fields

worldcrusier · 26 February 2008, 09:42 AM

My landing strip needs to have some areas smoothed. Does anyone have a good method? I'm thinking disk harrow then drag a levelling/smoothing drag behind the tractor. Then roll the area. Any idea's?

AAC Cadet Leader · 26 February 2008, 05:45 PM

can't answer your question, but wondering how close you are to harvey young field? a great old airport. and does the forties music still pipe through the old tin t-hangars there?

worldcrusier · 27 February 2008, 06:19 AM

Harvey Young is still open and is marginally maintained. Harvy went west 20 or 25 years ago and the airport has passed through several hands. It's future is questionable.
I grew up down the road from Harvey Youg and practally lived there as a kid in the 60's. There was always music broadcast from very large speakers on his house in the center of the airport. He had literally thousands of records. You could always find someone working on an aircraft in an open hanger. I learned rib stiching there. I would also bum rides with familiar local pilots. In this day and age of preditory lawyers, a Harvey Young type of experience is impossible. I saw Lefty Gardner land and take off his white P-38 from that 2200 Foot strip. WoW!

AAC Cadet Leader · 27 February 2008, 10:55 PM

what great memories you have from there. so sad it isn't what it used to be. seems to be the demise of many airfields that were twenty years ago and are now shopping malls or headed that way.

i loved the surreal environment when i landed at harvey young airfield in 1988 and toured past the old tin hangars with the glenn miller music everywhere.

good luck with your own grass airfield! what will you be flying off of it?

are you near grundy's? i remember reading "grundy's" spelled out in tree logs as we flew near tulsa.

worldcrusier · 28 February 2008, 06:21 AM

Gundy's is northeast of Tulsa and has expanded from a landing field to a very large fly-in community. My strip is 10 mi. south of Tulsa Jones - Riverside, 26OK on the Dallas sectional, Duckcreek. I fly a Stinson OY-1 (L-5E), Lady Satan, the same airplane that I flew in as a 13 year old CAP cadet at Harvey Young airport. I found it in Nebraska in 1980 and restored in in 1990 to Marine Corps markings of VMO 2 on Iwo Jima.