Rochelle Municipal Airport is a city owned general aviation field of a hundred and thirteen acres on the south edge of town, and its best known tenant drops people out of aeroplanes over it. Chicagoland Skydiving Center runs from a purpose built campus there. By the company's own account the operation descends from a drop zone established at Hinckley, twenty four miles east, in 1968, though the present business has been under its current ownership only since 2000, and independent record of the Hinckley field begins in 1970. What is documented is the move. The company fell out with the landowners at Hinckley, where it had been working off a grass strip with a little hangar space and a landing area cut out of the corn, and in the spring of 2011 it relocated to Rochelle and built a two million dollar facility from nothing. That is a large sum for a sport operation in a farm county, and it bought what a grass strip cannot offer: a paved runway, hangar and packing space, and room for people to wait. The standard jump run climbs to fourteen thousand feet, which gives about a minute of freefall, and the aircraft will go to eighteen thousand for anyone wanting ninety seconds of it. Above eighteen thousand the airspace becomes Class A and a jump needs air traffic control's authorisation; below that a drop zone still has to file notice, but the sky over Ogle County is otherwise its own. The centre flies Friday to Sunday.
Getting there
41.8904, -89.0776
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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