Supersonic airliners never became as common as airlines and government officials hoped.

When supersonic flight was set to transform passenger air travel in the late 1960s, Miami-Dade County had grand ambitions of becoming the center of commercial aviation’s fledgling intercontinental network. Local government wanted to construct the world’s largest airport in the middle of Everglades, 60 miles west of South Beach. However, plans for Everglades Jetport collapsed due to technological limitations and concerns about permanently damaging the Everglades.

Everglades Jetport was planned to have six runways with each just under two miles in length. According to the National Park Service, the facility would have been five times larger than New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Jetport’s remote location in the future Big Cypress National Preserve also necessitated the construction of a new interstate highway and a monorail link to Miami. The sheer extravagance of the late Jet Age was going to be distilled and extracted onto 39 square miles of swamp land.

However, a single runway was completed before the project was halted. The runway opened as a general aviation airport as Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. The facility’s remote location allowed it to serve as an airliner flight training center until the advent of flight simulators. The Miami Herald reported in 2015 that there were plans to establish a Paris Air Show-style trade fair at Dade-Collier, but nothing came to fruition. Besides handling around a skim dozen flights per day, the lengthy strip of pavement is also used for runway racing events.

There’s A Relic Runway From America’s Failed Supersonic Future Hiding In The Everglades

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