When Charleston needed a real airport in 1944, the only flat ground was three hundred feet in the air. They blew it flat. The kid from Lincoln County who would one day give the field its name was still learning to fly.
A Pirep featured story · KCRW Yeager Airport, Charleston, WV
By 1942 Charleston, West Virginia had a problem. The state capital's only commercial airport, Wertz Field in Institute just west of the city, had been closed when the federal government built a synthetic rubber plant across its approaches for the war effort. Wertz had been too short for the new airliners anyway. The Allegheny terrain offered nothing better: every valley floor was taken, and every ridge was a ridge.
A study committee had already walked, driven, and mapped every candidate site, and reported back in five words: "We must build on the hilltops." Coonskin Ridge, just north of downtown, had three adjoining summits. On October 18, 1944, Harrison Construction of Pittsburgh broke ground on the largest earth-moving project in American history to that date. Two hundred pieces of heavy equipment graded the site; a pipeline up the mountainside delivered the 2,500 gallons of diesel they burned each day; more than two million pounds of explosives took the tops off three Appalachian mountains; nine million cubic yards of rock and earth were dozed and compacted into a plateau.
Kanawha Airport was dedicated on November 3, 1947, three hundred feet above the valleys of the Elk and Kanawha Rivers, dropping off sharply on every side. It still does. Twenty days before the dedication, a 24-year-old test pilot from Myra, an hour south in Lincoln County, had climbed into a Bell X-1 over the Mojave Desert and become the first human being to fly faster than sound. He had broken two ribs falling off a horse two days before the flight, and used a length of broom handle to close the hatch because he couldn't reach it.
In 1985 Charleston renamed the field for him; today it flies as West Virginia International Yeager Airport. The three mountains are still there. They're just underneath the runway.