A directional sign for pilots points the way to town, built by
Boy Scouts in the 1950s, during the ascendancy of Phoenix
into a megacity propelled by aviation. Below the sign is
the Salt River Sportsman’s Club shooting range.
CLUI photo
The main airport in Phoenix, Arizona, is called
Sky Harbor, and indeed this landlocked city’s harbor is the sky.
With the Salt River on its south side, and Honeywell’s engine
plant on the north side, the airport, like the city of Phoenix
itself, resides at the fulcrum between water and aviation.
Phoenix is now the 5th largest city in the USA, having surpassed
Philadelphia in 2004, according to most estimates.* Probably
nearly most of the four million people who live in the sprawling
mat of contiguous communities in the Valley of Fire (1.5 million
in Phoenix, and the rest in places like Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe,
and Glendale), know the creation myth of Phoenix.
The largest prehistoric settlement in what is now the USA was
located here, in the Salt River Valley. Over the course of several
hundred years, the Hohokam Indians built a network of canals,
as much as 500 miles of them, to irrigate their croplands of
corn, beans and squash. Numbering over 50,000 (some say 100,000),
this civilization disappeared abruptly in the 15th century. Possibly
due to floods, or droughts.
When the American settlers arrived in the 1860s, they found
the remains of these canals, and began digging them out, and
building more, enabling agriculture to take hold again in this
most arid place. Early boosters imagined a great civilization
rising up on the ashes of another, like a Phoenix. And they were
right.
Located on the Salt River, just below the confluence of the Verde River,
the Granite Reef Dam is the main distribution point for the water that
supplies Phoenix. Several canals intersect or originate here, upstream
of the city.
CLUI photo
Just Add Water, and Stir Vigorously
Agriculture (largely cotton and citrus) consumed the water
and fueled the economy of the city, and the precursors of the
metropolitan region around it, for its first several decades.
This was made possible by an extensive canal network, which was
at first built on those abandoned by the Indians. But the Salt
River was intermittent, unreliable, and often dry, and the groundwater
was being depleted. When the Bureau of Reclamation was created
by the federal government in 1902, the people of Phoenix,
who numbered around 6,000 at that time, took full advantage of
this new entity, with its mandate to build water infrastructure
in the west.
The Salt River Project was initiated in 1903, and construction
began immediately on the tallest masonry dam in the world, to
store the water of the Salt River in the mountains upstream,
east of the city. Completed in 1911, the Roosevelt Dam is still
the principal component in the city’s water supply, and its reservoir
is the largest lake wholly in Arizona. Over the next couple of
decades, three more dams and reservoirs were added to the river
to increase its capacity, Apache Lake, Canyon Lake, and Saguaro
Lake, each with hydroelectric facilities in their dams to produce
electricity. In later years three dams were added to the Verde
River, a tributary of the Salt River.
The canal system grew as the city and available water grew.
Seven major canals totaling over 120 miles are now operated by
the Salt River Project, and feed the southern portion of the
city with water from the River. The northern part of the city
is supplied by another entity, the Central Arizona Project (CAP).
This was a Bureau of Reclamation project, conceived in the 1960’s,
to bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, via a canal
336 miles in length, through the hottest desert in the nation.
The canal was completed in the mid 1990’s, at a price of nearly
$4 billion, half paid by the federal government, and half being
paid back by its operators, and the people of Arizona who buy
its water.
The Central Arizona Project (CAP) begins at Lake Havasu, near
the transplanted London Bridge, and zigzags for 190 miles as
an open canal, to Phoenix, aided by four pumping stations along
the way. This section, called the Hayden Rhodes Aqueduct, terminates
at the eastern end of the city. In northern Phoenix, some of
the water is discharged from the canal into the Union Hills Water
Treatment Plant, then is added to the water supply of the city.
The rest goes on to the Salt River, east of the city, at the
Granite Reef Dam. From there it plunges under the river, emerging
on the other side for its 145 mile journey to Tucson and its
suburbs.
The other part of the Salt River Project that has to be mentioned
is its electrical generation. Like Los Angeles’ DWP, the Salt
River Project (SRP) handles both Water and Power. Started in
1937, its Power District is operated by the state, and owns all
or portions of ten major power plants, including the largest
nuclear plant in the nation, at Palo Verde, west of Phoenix.
SRP is now the nation’s third largest public power utility.
Scottsdale airport opened in 1942 as Thunderbird
Field II, a basic pilot training for the Army Air Corps. It shut
down at the end of the war, after graduating 5,500 pilots. It
was purchased in 1953 by the Seventh Day Adventists, who used
it as a missionary pilot training field. The City of Scottsdale
purchased it in 1966, and it is now the busiest corporate jet
facility in the state.
CLUI photo
Phoenix Lifts its Wings from
the Fields and Flies into Aerospace
With more than 300 sunny days
a year (360 clear enough for uninstrumented flight), and plenty
of water and power, Phoenix transitioned from an agricultural
center to an aviation center during World War II, a condition
that shaped its future. Three main air bases were built: Williams
Field, in Chandler, south of the city, which was an advanced
flying school; Falcon Field, on the east side, in Mesa, where
thousands of British Royal Air Forces trained during the war;
and Luke, on the west side, which was the largest fighter training
base during the war. These and the dozen additional airfields
in the valley, became the loci of the modern growth of the
city.
Today, Luke is still one of the largest fighter bases in the
nation, with over 8,000 people training at the 2.7 million
acre Barry Goldwater Range in the southwestern corner of the
state. The Luke community in the valley, military families
and retirees, and civilians working for the base, number as
many as 100,000.
Though Falcon Field shut down after the war, and was converted
to a civilian airfield, it now hosts a business district with
a number of aerospace and military company facilities, including
ATK (one of the nation’s largest ordnance manufacturers), Lockheed
Martin, MD Helicopters, SDI, Talley Defense Systems, and a
large Boeing military helicopter plant.
Williams Field continued to be one of the Air Force’s busiest
pilot training bases until 1993, when it was closed by BRAC.
It has transitioned into an aviation research and technical
center, with modification and maintenance operations for military
aircraft by Boeing, and pilot testing and training technology
companies. On site is the Air Force’s Humane Effectiveness
Directorate, Mesa Research Site, which studies the impact and
interaction of military technologies on pilots, and uses the
human resources of nearby Luke Air Force Base, as well as the
corporate aviation resources in the region.
There are ten additional active airfields in the valley that
had their roots in WWII, as training or auxiliary military
fields. Among them is Goodyear airport. 20 miles west of Phoenix,
it was owned by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s Aircraft
Division, and was used by the Navy during WWII to build flight
decks, and as an aircraft storage, logistics, and training
site. After the war, and up to the 1960’s, it became one of
the largest military aircraft storage sites in the nation,
with as many as 5,000 aircraft on site at one time. After the
Korean War, the planes slowly were sold, scrapped, or moved
to AMARC, near Tucson, a region that is the national center
of aircraft boneyards, and purgatories. The Navy sold the airport
to the city of Phoenix in 1968, one of three airports now owned
by the city (the others are Sky Harbor and Deer Valley). Commercial
aircraft are still stored here, and a Goodyear blimp is often
parked here as well.
The clear weather and open skies around the city, which attracted
the military to the region in the first place, continues to
make the valley one of the busiest places for flight training.
At Goodyear is Oxford Aviation, an English company that trains
pilots for numerous Asian and Middle Eastern airlines (including
Iraq Airways, and Kuwait Airways), and some European airlines.
Lufthansa Airlines operates a training center there. Chandler
Municipal Airfield has several flight training schools, including
one that specializes in aerobatics. Though it only serves small
airplanes, the Deer Valley airport, north of the city, is the
busiest general aviation airport in the nation, with over 400,000
take offs and landings per year.
Some of the other fields have been integrated into the suburban
development, as fly-in communities, where residents have garages
linked to roadways on one side of the home, and hangars linked
to airstrips on the other. Others have been abandoned, and
have given way to sprawl.
Chandler as high tech and space center:
Motorola Space and Systems division, right, and satellite earth
station, left, with Orbital Launch Systems, upper right, and
Intel campus above that.
CLUI photo
In Chandler, at the southern end of the sprawl,
is another product of the legacy of aerospace in the valley.
Motorola operates a satellite control station and communication
R&D center, where Iridium, one of the first commercial satellite
phone systems, was deployed. This multifaceted spaceport is down
the road from Orbital Launch Systems Group, the rocket division
of Orbital, a leading satellite and missile defense company.
And next to that is one of the high tech company and computer
chip maker Intel’s largest corporate campuses, where a $3 billion
chip plant is nearing completion, which will bring the total
Intel employees working in Chandler well past the 10,000 mark.
Immediately west of the Intel campus are the remains of Chandler
Memorial Field, one of the auxiliary fields for Williams Air
Force Base, which became a training airport for McDonnell Douglas
Helicopters, and now is home to a small collection of decaying,
flightless aircraft.
But Sky Harbor airport remains an illustrative crux. It was
bought by the city before WWII, and was located in an agricultural
area, miles from the city center. Its early nickname was “The
Farm.” During WWII, it became a defense plant, when the aviation
parts company Garrett Corp., from Glendale, California, built
a new aircraft parts factory here to meet military demands, and
to be out of range of coastal attack.
After the war, the plant expanded with orders for Navy aircraft
engines and controls. The airport grew as well, serving the city’s
explosive population boom: Phoenix’s population in 1941 was around
65,000. After the war, it was 100,000. In 1960, 439,000. The
plant continued to make parts, and after a series of consolidations,
by 1999, when it was the aircraft engine company Allied Signal,
it changed its name to Honeywell, when it became that company.
Today, Sky Harbor sits in the middle of the metro area, and is
among the ten busiest airports in the nation. Honeywell is the
state’s largest private employer (after Wal-Mart, of course).
Lake Tempe is a segment of the river channel,
inundated for recreational use. Two inflatable dams on either
end hold in the water.
CLUI photo
The river that gave birth to the city, the Salt
River, lies, uselessly, next to the sky harbor. For its run through
the city, it is mostly a desiccated, dribbling swath of sediment
that flails chaotically through an otherwise ordered grid. The
channel has been dug up, and continues to be the primary source
of construction aggregate for the valley. In Tempe, a bizarre
recreational park has used inflatable dams to create a long,
narrow lake in the river channel. Other than that, the river
is a dry wash until, after passing the main parts of the city,
and the airport, it gets an injection from the city’s largest
sewage treatment plant, which is also expanding. Then the river
merges with the Gila and the Agua Fria rivers, and passes out
into the western desert.
Phoenix’s Harbor of the Sky: On the left
is the dry Salt River, on the right is Honeywell Aerospace.
CLUI photo
*The shrinking city of Philadelphia held the
number 5 spot for around 15 years, after being bumped out of
the number 4 spot by Houston in the 1980s. Of course, Phoenix’s
ascendence up the list is based on a number, based on political
lines, and the fact that the city limit encloses 515 square miles
(and growing), several times larger than Philadelphia’s area.
Philadelphia’s metro area is more populous than Phoenix’s, for
the time being.
