In the final installment of THE AIRPORT, Bill Shein presents a detailed history of Great Barrington’s zoning bylaw and its key role in the past, present, and still-unknown future of the town’s 92-year-old country airport.
Impatience, anger, over-reaction has always been with us. So too murder. And just maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention in the 1950s, but it seems to me we’re facing an epidemic where more and more of us skip from understandable annoyance to shotgun blasts, when being pissed off or afraid somehow justifies bullets flying.
The Great Barrington Airport offers lessons to those interested in aviation as a hobby and, in some cases, a career with the airlines. Whether the flight school creates safety risks for those living nearby has long been a concern of some of its neighbors.
I don’t know if Draft Kings wants to take the action, but I’m betting that The Tucker Trump Show went a long way in reassuring Donald Trump that FOX was still with him.
What started out as a good week for the Rule of Law, with the indictment of former President Trump and the victory of Janet Protasiewicz for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, ended with yet another right-wing judicial attack on women’s ability to make their own health decisions and on the ability of physicians to practice medicine free of narrow-minded religious bias.
The debate over the airport’s level of activity and the noise and disturbance it produces has been contentious for decades. Better information and consistent zoning enforcement would help.
Sadly, as I imagine the citizens of East Palestine will soon discover, no one can better protect their friends and neighbors and children than active and engaged—even angry—members of their own community.
According to Fairview Hospital officials, each year 15 emergency helicopter air-ambulance flights lift off from Great Barrington Airport to rush Fairview patients to other hospitals. Here’s how those flights work—and how they fit into our rural health-care system.
What if lying were Tucker’s job. Can you imagine forcing yourself to tell lies all day about every subject in ways that were so transparent and so outlandish that there is no way the people listening to you could possibly believe anything you said? Then imagine doing that again and again and again every day of your professional life for your entire life. Could Tucker do that?
The airport sits atop an aquifer that supplies Great Barrington’s water. Over the decades, it has stored as much as 54,000 gallons of petroleum in underground tanks—and for years failed to fully comply with state environmental regulations. It's in a zoning district with strict water-protection rules. Is the town doing enough to monitor its activities?
While some want us to believe it’s the end of COVID as we know it, those who confront the virus every day, either fighting it in our hospitals or in our laboratories, and especially those suffering from it, are pretty sure we’re still at the beginning.
With its level of operations at issue in court and in front of town boards, why has there been so little effort to document what's actually happening at the airport?
The complicated present of the Great Barrington Airport is deeply rooted in its equally complicated past. Rick Solan had little to do with what happened before 2008, but it’s what threatens his present and future.
As Berkshire Aviation Enterprises goes in front of the Great Barrington Selectboard for the third time seeking release from zoning restrictions, a contentious community discussion is again underway. In this in-depth series, Bill Shein examines the issues, people, and history swirling around a small-town airport.
Unlike Butch and Sundance, we should all be very grateful that Cassidy Hutchinson managed to turn around just in time to defy Trump Land and to live another day and tell us the truth.
Layman that I am, I might very well be alone in the analysis that follows, but I’m going to offer some examples of what I see as the intersection of psychopathy, self-absorption, and stupidity.
