Club Homepage Forums Classified Ads Buy & Sell - Everything But Airplanes Airport for sale

I can't argue about the sustainability but I can clarify some things about this airport and the town it's in.

The runway is in good shape. It is not a private airport.

One end is acres of blackberry bushes, then highway, then lake, industrial zone, and flood zone farmland.

The other end is state fairgrounds and race track where every week thousands gather for the races, demo derby, and fireworks show, etc. It's so loud it rattles every window in town and people are always getting injured and dying. Happens when they practice weekdays too. I think one time somebody made the mistake of trying to complain about it on the town FB page.

That an airport is designated open for public use is not sufficient to qualify for FAA grants.

From www.airnav.com [airnav.com]

Airport Ownership and Management from official FAA records
Ownership: Privately-owned
Owner: DARYL HABICH
13812 179TH AVE SE
MONROE, WA 98272
Phone 360-794-8570

From https://www.faa.gov/airports/aip/overview/:

AIP grants for planning, development, or noise compatibility projects are at or associated with individual public-use airports (including heliports and seaplane bases). A public-use airport is an airport open to the public that also meets the following criteria:

Publicly owned, or
Privately owned but designated by FAA as a reliever, or
Privately owned but having scheduled service and at least 2,500 annual enplanements.

Further, to be eligible for a grant, an airport must be included in the NPIAS. The NPIAS, which is prepared and published every 2 years, identifies public-use airports that are important to public transportation and contribute to the needs of civil aviation, national defense, and the Postal service.

From https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/npias/current/

L16 is not found in the NPIAS list, so not eligible for funding.

It is a privately-owned airport that's open to the public. So not eligible for FAA grants, I would assume.

There are LOTS of those (privately owned, open to the public) all over the country. Locally, we have plenty of other examples: Apex, in Silverdale, Norman Grier (Crest) in Kent, Eisenberg (Oak Harbor). Sequim Valley (Sequim). Shady Acres (Spanaway). There are more, but you get the idea -- it's not unheard of. Worth noting: almost all of those have airpark residences, so there's a source of funding (and a captive user-base). Don't think that's an option at FirstAir. So how do the others stay viable? -- well, Eisenberg (the only one in that group that doesn't have airport homes) has always seemed to me to be just b-a-r-e-l-y above water, forever (through several owners). They've got a handful of old hangars and tiedowns, and fuel sales (off-and-on over the years), not much income I'm sure -- probably similar to FirstAir.

Buying an airport does not seem to be a rational business decision. Neither is buying a personal airplane, yet most of us somehow got past that awkward fact... Most likely the only way to make a profit by buying this airport would be to buy it, wait for land values to appreciate, then sell it off to be developed, probably for housing...which is where we are now (land values around here continue to go up and that's not going to change anytime soon...although if someone wanted to operate it as an airport, it would be good to know that one could always get their investment back). Don't know of any for-profit business model that would work for a small airport like this - but would love to be proved wrong!

There are other reasons for doing things besides turning a profit. I suspect buying FirstAir Field would require the same kind of judgement/logic reconciliation that we all went through when buying our planes.

Lee Bottom Flying Field [theraf.org] is a privately-owned, public use airport north of Louisville, KY and 6 miles south of Hanover, IN. They survive solely on donations.