I know nothing about planes and have only flown commercial and been to big international airports. My great Uncle had a little two seater with a little runway/landing strip on the back of his farm. He flew me over Lake Erie and the neighboring Bison farm a couple times when I was little.
So maybe a dumb question but I love the show Wings always have since I was a little kid.

Did/Does that sort of little airport exist? I always thought it would be fun to fly into a little airport like that grab a little lunch and fly home.

Anything like that exist within an couple hour flight from Kentucky?

Wings is one of my favorite shows…have it in my collection.

Buy/rent the documentary One Six Right: The Romance of Flying. It chronicles the Van Nuys airport and discusses your very question. WONDERFUL film!

Brenham,TX Municipal Airport HAD a wonderful restaurant on the field…Dreamliner Diner. I think fu**ing Covid shut it down.

Not sure what’s in the Kentucky area.

Try this Link

The Pendleton regional airport here in Oregon has a little cafe called Elvis's Cafe.

It has grown recently with a bunch of commercial UAS stuff, but the cafe is the same as the first time I ate there.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of those type of airports all around the country. Part of the fun of my job is discovering the restaurant gems everywhere I go. The "wings" airport and community is alive and well.
FYI, the Nantucket airport KACK, where the show was based, but not actually flimed, was visited by the cast many times. They have a photo gallery up in the hallway to the restaurant of all the cast members. And their Clam chowder is delicious, I always get some to go when we land there.

One Six Right is a movie about Van Nuys, a relatively large GA airport with a lot of jets based there as well as some smaller aircraft. I still remember flying back from Burbank to Santa Paula and going through Van Nuys airspace at least 30 years later. I think I heard maybe two airplanes while transiting Van Nuys. When I got to SZP (a small, privately owned, public use GA airport with a single 2665' long by 60' wide runway (okay, there is a small grass strip, much shorter, right up against the runway on the south side) there were six airplanes in the (non-towered) pattern. There are a lot of small airports all over, and even at some of the bigger ones, there are good folks at the FBOs (Fixed Base Operators) to help you on your way.

ETA: "I always thought it would be fun to fly into a little airport like that grab a little lunch and fly home." This used to be called a "hundred dollar hamburger", but it is mostly called a "two hundred dollar hamburger" now, and is often more expensive than that. It is still a good time though. Any excuse to turn avgas (aviation gasoline) into noise is a good one.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: slosig,

Wings was filmed at Nantucket Airport which is still in use.

There used to be a show called Flying Wild Alaska on tv about a real airport in Alaska that looked smaller than the airport on wings.

The show features the Tweto family from Unalakleet, Alaska who run the Alaska airline Era Alaska. They operate the hub operations from Unalakleet. The show also features other segments from their bases in Utqiagvik (Barrow), Deadhorse, and other places.

Wow I didn’t realize Jim Tweto was killed in a plane crash on June 16, 2023, at the age of 68.

Way out of your way, but I have been (not flown) to the Hesperia, CA airport. I have a recollection of its being mentioned in the 80s TV show Riptide. I left the area 20 years ago, but it had a cafe with decent food.

I never paid attention to whether it has a restaurant on premises, but I work half a mile from the Elizabethton, TN airport. Business jets fly in and out fairly often, so I don't know that it meets your definition of "little." In 2019 one of those, carrying Dale Earnhardt Jt. and his family, had a landing mishap in the adjacent highway.

 
E25,Wickenburg Municipal Airport fits the category of smallish, though it has a nice runway @6,000ft +. No food, though. It is probably busier than the type of airport mentioned in the OP. Some of our snowbirds arrive in small jets.
 

I live within 5 miles of the Marion, Iowa Airport. Nice facility with both fixed wing and helicopter services available. When I lived further West of here there were several small town airports that offered services, one of which had sky diving/parachute services.

http://www.fly2lunch.com/

Ask for what you seek, and you will find it.

Bowman Field in Louisville, KY (KLOU). The ghosts of “Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund” haunt this place.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...wman_Field_(Kentucky)

Many airports (and not just the smallest ones) are a community unto themselves. The aforementioned VNY, where my sister and BIL owned a completion shop certainly was one, and may still be, but I haven't been there in 15 years.

I've never seen the show Wings, but if it represents that flight tends to bond those enamored of it, they are right on the money.

I live right next to Deer Valley Airport and they used to have an excellent restaurant that looked onto the flight line. I went there plenty when I had no other business at the airport.

There is a great little airport near Pinehurst, NC in Carthage that has several WW2 planes on exhibit and some of the best BBQ I’ve ever eaten. Most people eat outside under the awning and watch the small planes come and go. Many of the planes come for lunch or dinner.

Gilliam-McConnell Airfield - BQ1

It’s so small it doesn’t have a website!

We have a small county airport about 10 miles from me. Every once in a while my father-in-law would fly down and we would grab lunch at the small cafe.
Nothing special, just a small airport like in the show.

Airports come in all sizes and shapes. Around here, if I wanted one of the above-mentioned Hundred Dollar Hamburgers, there was a nice little café adjacent to the Williston FL airport, where the amazing kitchen would not adhere to the common practice of incinerating a burger into a tasteless charred lump. They would actually do it medium rare, if requested!

No control tower at that airport, it was take a good look, make sure that there was no conflicting traffic, announce your intentions if you had a radio, and go.

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A somewhat larger near-by airport, with a control tower and a variety of instrument approach procedures (great for an instrument training flight), is Ocala. Pretty decent little restaurant there, too.

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Many years ago I made fuel stops in the Atlanta area on my regular Florida-Ohio flights, and had two of the best airport meals that I've ever had. One was a food-truck type BBQ vendor at the Athens GA airport. Another was a table set up by two black ladies at the Macon GA airport -- fried chicken, an assortment of southern type vegetables, fresh peach cobbler, and great ice tea. A food overload, with change from a ten dollar bill.

Opening sequence for One Six Right...



Mr. V-Tail, Fly-Sig, and other pilots will understand it when I say this puts a lump in my throat for what I do, and the love I have of being a pilot. Like Brian told Joe in Wings in one episode, "Being a pilot was like knowing the biggest secret in the world".

quote:

Originally posted by erj_pilot:
Brenham,TX Municipal Airport HAD a wonderful restaurant on the field…Dreamliner Diner. I think fu**ing Covid shut it down.

Similarly, the Springdale, Arkansas municipal airport used to have an excellent cafe, but it also shut down for COVID and never reopened.

The Port Clinton, Ohio Airport is much like you described. It has an old reclaimed polished silver diner with checkerboard tile floors and a real old Norman Rockwell counter. Did I mention that the food is great and large portions.
It used to be the home base for the old Ford Tri-motors that serviced the Lake Erie Islands.
It also has a decent museum that has lots of WW 2 focus as well as the airport history.
There are two WW 2 PT boats on site. One was in the stages of reconstruction when I last toured the museum. It is in a back hanger that also houses a large area dedicated to PT 109. Leonard J Thom, executive officer of PT 109, was from nearby Sandusky, Ohio. His family donated quite a bit of memorabilia from his navy service and from his involvement in the making of the movie.
If you are ever in that area it is well worth a stop.