Planned to be the largest airport in the world, Dade-Collier Airport is situated in the heart of the Florida Everglades, Miami, in Collier County, Florida. This place was completely abandoned from modern civilization. Dade-Collier was operated by the Miami-Dade Aviation Department and owned by Miami-Dade County. It could be the world's largest airport but today it has become nothing more than an airstrip in the middle of nowhere.

The Background of Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport

Today’s Dade-Collier Airport known as Everglades Jetport or Big Cypress Jetport was started in 1968. It was planned to be five times bigger than the size of New York JFK. It was planned to be the largest airport in the world. It covers 24,960 acres along with six runways and also connected both the Gulf of Mexico and Central Miami.

During the time of this airport’s construction, this place was chosen as a good halt for Boeing 2707, which was an American superjet project. But the construction of this airport was never complete, due to some environmental concerns. Later in the year 1970. The Boeing project was also canceled.

Why was the construction of the airport canceled and made Dade-Collier Airport isolated

In 1970 it was planned to build a 1000 foot wide road and a rail corridor but there was soon started to arise several natural disasters, and due to this reason the construction of the airport was stopped, only one out of six runways were completed. And after the fall of the project Boeing superjet, this airport was slowly abandoned and later closed. 

Is the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport still used?

Despite the Dade-Collier’s abandonment and unfinished structure, it is still used by the local government as a public airport and also for training purposes. This airport is mostly used for Pan Am and Eastern Airlines for training purposes.

Today the airports are used more frequently for training flights and because of their huge space and also rigged with new instrument landing systems.  This airport is helpful for pilots for landing with low cloud ceilings and also poor visibility. In the future the authorities try to introduce flight simulators, this could make the training flights low cost. But now the airport is also open for civil aviation.

Dade-Collier airport is also used for High-speed automobiles events as the runways are too long for holding this kind of event. In 2009 oil exploration on this airport site was not pursued due to refusal from the Conservation group.Another event “Miami International Air Show” is also held regularly in Dade-Collier Airport, as suggested by Carlos Gimenez.