This recent video answers a question: Can the air strip at the Route 66 town of Amboy, California, still be used by airplanes?
The answer: Yes, indeed.
Matt Guthmiller, who’s been flying since age 16, took a video crew with him in his small airplane on a trip from Lake Havasu to the Amboy air strip, which is gravel but, as you’ll see, obviously still usable.
From the air strip, a pilot can taxi the plane right to the parking lot of Roy’s in Amboy — the town’s only surviving business — and even onto Route 66 itself if traffic is light.
You can skip ahead to about the 11-minute mark of this 24-minute video for the Amboy material:
More about the Amboy air strip may be found here. It dates to 1925.
Believe it or not, the nearby Route 66 town of Bagdad, which now is abandoned, once had an airfield, too.
Guthmiller correctly notes actor Harrison Ford used to fly his private plane to Amboy and hole up in one of the now-closed motel cabins to get away from the Hollywood rat race for few days.
In a sad epilogue, the video notes Guthmiller’s friend and passenger in the video, Colt Thomas Richter, died in plane crash in July. He was 24.
(Screen-capture image from video of Matt Guthmiller’s plane at Roy’s in Amboy, California)