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Sunday, February 7, 2010 - 2:48PM CST

MidAmerica Airport

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and brought down my business.

I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. This page is a detailed account of the biggest threat to my photography and video operation that I had to battle daily to just barely survive, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem facing all of my colleagues as well.

click to enlarge

One exit west of New Baden on I-64 is a small, relatively new, state-of-the-art airport called MidAmerica. It was built in 1998 partly to relieve congestion at Lambert Field (St. Louis' main airport), a vision that was never realized. MidAmerica's 10,000-foot runway/taxiways are connected to and used by next-door Scott Air Force Base. Other than the military traffic and currently one commercial cargo flight per week, the airport has no scheduled flights - and is not served by any passenger carrier.

I drove over this afternoon to check it out. The doors are open and a few cars are in the parking lot, but I saw no one else inside the terminal. Pretty unusual to have an airport all to yourself.

MidAmerica has been sharply criticized as a waste of taxpayer dollars (here is an NBC Nightly News report to that tune). It seems though that it could be a convenient place to base a low-cost airline. Its lights are always on and doors open, so I guess they're not giving up on trying to make that happen.