McNary Field

McNary Field, also known as the Salem Municipal Airport, and also as SLE, is a general aviation airport located in Salem, Oregon. The airport is located about two miles from downtown Salem, and has two runways, each about a mile long. The airport is home to an Army Air National Guard base, is a cargo shipping point, and has chartered flights, but has not had regularly scheduled commercial air flights for over a decade.

McNary Field is notable in that regard, because it makes Salem, Oregon one of only four capital cities (at least by my count) in the United States without an airport providing regular, commercial service. It is a little less than 60 miles between Portland International Airport and downtown Salem, a distance that is more easily passed by shuttle bus or train than by airplane. This quandary in transportation is an example of the difficult situation Salem finds itself in: the Salem area has at least 200,000 people, and at an hour away from Portland, it would not conventionally be considered a suburb, but its size and distance from Portland doesn't seem to be enough to justify having its own commercial airport. Although people in Portland and Salem might not admit it, Salem is in some ways a suburb of Portland that depends on its infrastructure.

As for expanding the airport so that it could take larger airliners direct from other cities, instead of commuter flights from Portland, this faces two problems: first, at 200,000 people, Salem isn't quite large enough to have a lot of demand for long distance flights. Secondly, McNary Field itself, although it was on the edge of Salem when it was built, is now surrounded by residential neighborhoods, commercial properties, and highways and freeways on all sides, and it doesn't seem feasible to expand it.