1-planar graphs are graphs that can be drawn in the plane such that any edge intersects with at most one other edge. Ackerman showed that the edges of a 1-planar graph can be partitioned into a planar graph and a forest, and claims that the proof leads to a linear time algorithm. However, it is not clear how one would obtain such an algorithm from his proof. In this paper, we first reprove Ackerman’s result (in fact, we prove a slightly more general statement) and then show that the split can be found in linear time by using an edge-contraction data structure by Holm, Italiano, Karczmarz, Łącki, Rotenberg and Sankowski.