The extension brings the runway length to 12,500 feet, making it the longest nonfederal runway in Kern County, according to airport officials. It was declared open for use by the Caltrans Division of Aeronautics on Dec. 5.
The longer runway will make possible long-haul freight flights, which may use the airport as a hub for distribution of goods.
Trucking activities could be conducted at vacant areas on the north side of the airport, with access to the State Route 58 bypass and Highway 14, district General Manager Stu Witt said.
A rail spur already connects the airport to the main Southern Pacific line through Mojave.
The activity could lead to the airport becoming the ground distribution center for freight from Central America, Mexico and Asia, Witt said.
And this will help new space companies moving in as well, like XCOR:
New hangar and office facilities, which will utilize vacant land along the new taxiway, will help ease the shortage of space available at the airport, where officials have leased all facilities available.
Here are two more appropriately caustic reviews of Jimmy Carter’s viciously anti-semitic and clueless new book, from Jacob Laksin at the conservative FrontPage Magazine, and the liberal Michael Kinsley. Apparently, Carter is a uniter, not a divider.
From a surprising source (the WaPo) an editorial about dictators and double standards.
The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet’s coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.
I was rewriting history, while walking along some cold lakeshore the other day. My thought was: if Churchill had only come to power in 1937, Chamberlain would have been installed to replace him in 1940.
Had Churchill been in power, and refused to sign Munich, he would have been blamed for the outbreak of war.
I can just hear the prattle in an English pub, circa 1950. “He pushed Hitler to it! Had it not been for Churchill, Hitler would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, and England would never have had to surrender. Everything was Churchill’s fault!”