"Mitty" wrote in message
...

Marquette/Sawyer KSAW has one runway, 2 1/2 miles long x 150' pointed
1/19. Now the collective wisdom of airport designers in this part of the
country is that, if you have only one runway, you do it like 14/32 or
12/34. But I have to believe that whoever committed to 2 1/2 miles of
concrete -- out in the woods where he could have pointed it wherever he
wanted -- must have looked at prevailing winds. So are the winds
different because of the lake? I don't particularly want to divert from
there just because my little PA-28 can't handle a crosswind, although
there are several easy places to go.


Could he have pointed it wherever he wanted? That runway is long, wide, and
thick, I imagine surface features and subsoils played a significant role.
Perhaps even more significant than prevailing winds. Post-WWII USAF bases,
as SAW was up to about eight years ago, tend to have one large runway or
parallel runways, no crosswind runways at all. The USAF didn't seem to care
that much about crosswinds.