From Pinecastle Army Airfield to MCO: The Airport With Pine Castle’s Name
Two miles southeast of Pine Castle, an airfield named for the community trained B-17 crews, tested the X-1, became McCoy Air Force Base — and now lands the world's flights as Orlando International, code MCO.
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Every day, millions of travellers read three letters that are, indirectly, a Pine Castle memorial: MCO. The airport they belong to began two miles southeast of Pine Castle as an airfield named for this community, and the line from that field to Orlando International Airport is one of the great local stories in Florida aviation.
Pinecastle Army Airfield
Built as Orlando’s replacement airfield and leased to the Army in the Second World War, the field was renamed Pinecastle Army Airfield on January 1, 1943, and trained B-17 bomber crews. Its remoteness and its 10,000-foot runway made it a test site: in early 1946, Bell Aircraft’s X-1 supersonic rocket plane made its first unpowered glide tests here, before the program moved west. The field returned to the city in 1947, was reacquired and reactivated as Pinecastle Air Force Base in 1951, and renamed McCoy Air Force Base in 1958 for Colonel Michael N. W. McCoy, killed in a B-47 crash the year before.
McCoy becomes MCO
McCoy was Orlando’s biggest employer before Disney World opened; when the base closed in 1975, the site became the city’s international airport — carrying McCoy’s name forward in its FAA code, MCO, to this day. Pine Castle, the community, sits five minutes from the airport’s north side: its southeastern neighbour is the reason half the world can pronounce its region, and its own name flew first, on the airfield’s sign, in 1943.
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