1 Sounds like a common story, actually, a rural airport turning into shopping mall!

2

Considering how big a piece of land it was and where it was located, it's easy to understand why the developer wanted it.

3 Despite being well known and active recently, Coronado airport of Albuquerque does not appear in Wikipedia (it is on Freeman though).

4 The small airport near where I grew up died not long after I took ground school, which is why I didn't continue to flight lessons. Transformed into a U-store, all those big hangers are storing boats and the like now.

Not sure why, it was in regular use. Maybe didn't generate enough revenue to cover property taxes as the area built up. That's a pretty common killer for small airports, I think.

5

In some places noise is the issue. In Massachusetts, there's Hanscom AFB. It was mostly shuttered in one round of base closures during the 80's and for a while it looked like it was going to be closed entirely.

If so, the best thing to do with it would have been to turn it into a reliever airport for Logan. It's a fantastic location for one, west of Boston and right off I-95. It could have handled a lot of the domestic flights going into the Boston area and reduced the congestion at Logan. (It could have handled 737-size jets just fine.)

Unfortunately, it's also right between Lincoln and Bedford, which are rich bedroom communities. And all the precious rich people there raised a stink when they heard of those plans. So it didn't happen.

Generally a lot of good stuff in Mass doesn't happen because of "home rule". That's why 8-lane Route 2 turns into a city street at the Cambridge border; the city of Cambridge refused to let the state build the highway through.

(Gad, I was glad to move away from Massachusetts...)