“I’ll be home in an hour!” “WHAT?” “I SAID I’LL BE HOME IN AN HOUR!”

Hermitage Airport was one of several now-vanished little airfields that once encircled Richmond in the early days of aviation. It was located on flat terrain to the south and west of the intersection of Laburnum Avenue and Hermitage Road on the North Side. Established in 1925 as Charles Airport, the field was used by amateurs, experts, barnstormers, and ex-military pilots. Charles Airport perished in the Great Depression, but new investors purchased the property, renamed it Hermitage Airport and turned it into a successful enterprise.

 

A view of one of the hangers at the Hermitage Airport. The airplane in the foreground crashed in 1946, killing three people. From Virginia Airports: A Historical Survey of Airports and Aviation from the Earliest Days.

 

By the early 1940s the airfield boasted two runways of 2000 and 1600 feet, and in 1941, a third hanger was constructed for for fuel and airplane maintenance. The same year, with the situation deteriorating in Europe, Hermitage Airport began formal civilian pilot training for defense purposes. It also served as an emergency landing site for military flights. Hermitage Airport put on air shows and exhibitions during this period, with acrobatic planes performing tricks and maneuvers over the North Side and thrilling audiences with a display of dive-bombing where a moving car was hit with a two-pound bag of flour.

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 10, 1943.

 

Hermitage Airport still retained some of the color of the barnstorming days of flying – and the risks associated with those earlier pilots and their canvas biplanes. On March 18, 1943, police patrolling in the area of the airport noticed a plane wobbling down the runway at 2:30 in the morning. It managed to take off and fought for altitude but came down three blocks away, hitting a house on Wilmington Avenue. A drunken aviation mechanic on leave from the Navy and another enthusiast with him climbed out of the wreckage of the stolen Piper Cub and ran off, only to be arrested later. On March 10, 1945, a Northside pharmacist named Rodney Arrington and his wife were killed in an airplane that took off from Hermitage Airport and crashed on a golf course less than an hour later.

 

None of this was on the mind of Richard F. Kiefer, a 31-year-old oil equipment company service manager just two weeks later when he left work on the afternoon of March 24. Instead of returning to his home at 7708 Hollins Road, he drove out to Hermitage Airport. Kiefer earned his pilot’s license and had about a year’s experience flying. He was also a corporal in the Virginia Civil Air Patrol, an Air Force auxiliary service that had been created in World War II for patrolling and reconnaissance. Kiefer decided to rent a Piper J-3 Cub for the afternoon.

 

A vintage Piper J-3 Cub like the one piloted by Robert Kiefer in 1945. Note the large cockpit door / window. Barrie Aircraft Museum

 

First sold in 1930, the Piper Cub was a cheap, basic design whose popularity has been compared to Ford’s Model T automobile, and thousands of flyers during the war had trained on the famously slow two-seat airplane. The Army used the Piper Cub extensively during World War II, and at the peak of its production during the war one of these simple and versatile aircraft was being built by the factory every twenty minutes.

 

Even though the war in Europe was winding down in March 1945 there was still a market for civilian sales, and of the twelve Piper Cub dealerships in Virginia at the time, one was Currie Sales and Service, based at Hermitage Airport. It offered to finance the $1600 airplane for only $665 down and included free flying lessons. A bright yellow paint job was standard for civilian Piper Cubs, so it would not have been hard to spot Kiefer’s airplane as it rose above the trees of North Side and turned southwest toward the James River. Kiefer promised the staff at Hermitage Airport he would return the plane by dark and the airport log showed he lifted off the runway at 1:48 PM.

 

Anne Kiefer was standing in the back yard of her home on the left when she heard her husband’s voice above her, screaming over the sound of a low-flying airplane.

 

Kiefer’s wife, Anne, was in the back yard of their home just south of Patterson Avenue and must have been startled by the loud drone of an airplane above Hollins Road. Looking up, she saw a bright yellow airplane whose open window framed her husband at the controls. The Piper Cub had a generous door and window opening which allowed access to the rearmost seat and also made it easy for the pilot to communicate with someone outside the plane – although not usually at this range.

 

Low over the trees, Kiefer circled his house. “Neighbors and children who were playing in the street reported Mr. Kiefer, who was alone in the plane, had been calling down to his wife, Anne, while the plane was circling,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch the next day. Kiefer screamed down to his wife over the sound of the engine that “he would be home within an hour,” and while technically true, his arrival back on Hollins Road was going to occur a lot sooner than Robert Kiefer imagined.

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 25, 1945.

 

Perhaps in an effort to get his wife to understand what he was shouting, Kiefer made more low, banking turns above his house. As he came around one more time, the wing of the plane dipped, the engine stalled out, and the little yellow plane dropped from the sky. “Barely missing a deep culvert, the plane hit the shoulder of the road and bounced 30 feet across to the other side where it crashed to a stop with its left side against a large boulder on the edge of a wooded patch,” in the vacant lot next to Kiefer’s house. Neighbors rushed to the scene and gingerly removed Kiefer from the wreckage and an ambulance took him downtown to the Medical College of Virginia. His condition was described as “fair” with a severe laceration across his forehead and a laceration and fracture of his ankle.

 

The location on Hollins Road where Richard Kiefer’s Piper Cub crashed in 1945.

 

A spokesman for Hermitage Airport confirmed that the facility owned the plane Kiefer wrecked and that it was a total loss, with the propellor, landing gear, and engine all smashed and the right wing torn from the fuselage. Mrs. Kiefer’s reaction to the flying misstep that destroyed an airplane in front of their house and almost killed her husband, reducing him to a bloody mess in the middle of Hollins Road was not recorded in the newspaper. Nor were there any further mentions of Kiefer’s participation in the Civil Air Patrol. Kiefer recovered from his injuries and his family soon moved to Stratford Hills on the other side of the river, where perhaps the heavily scarred amateur pilot and his flying adventures were not quite as famous.

 

Today the Rosedale neighborhood occupies the land where Hermitage Airport once stood, and virtually no trace of the airfield still exists.

 

Hermitage Airport did not last long after World War II. A Richmond newspaper reported in early 1948 that “The end of Hermitage Airport, one of the state’s oldest havens for aircraft, was in sight yesterday, with the announcement by the Lewis Ginter Land and Improvement Company, owners, that the lease had been cancelled.” The runways were plowed up, the hangers demolished, and this once extensive and important element of aviation in Richmond was covered by the Rosedale subdivision. Another large part of the property was eventually consumed by the interchange where Interstates 95 and 64 meet. Like so many of the small Richmond airfields, nothing of the facility that Robert Kiefer took off from that March afternoon in 1945 exists today.

 

Today, Hollins Road is very much like any other Henrico County street lined with 1940s houses, its only distinguishing characteristic being the large ditch down the median that Kiefer’s plane missed before coming to a mangled rest. Dog walkers and kids, an occasional car or UPS truck are the only interruptions to this suburban scene. It is probably not unlike the quiet afternoon almost 80 years ago when utter chaos suddenly broke out on Hollins, starting with someone in the sky shouting over the drone of an engine followed by the rending, frightening crash of a little bright yellow airplane in the middle of the road.

 

-Selden