The Front-Door Fliers

Businessmen who do not have their own plane these days are often considered just not with it. The speed and convenience of the 35,000 planes now owned by U.S. business have made the aircraft a major operating tool. Yet most flying executives still face a bothersome trip from office to airport, then from a landing field to their customer's office. To eliminate this time-consuming delay, some air-minded firms have launched a trend that may eventually change the nature of business travel: they are setting up shop in fly-in industrial parks that have an airstrip right at the front door.

About 200 such complexes are being planned or built. They offer a businessman greater mobility than even today's frequent airline flights allow, enable him to land right where his business is, bypassing airports, taxis and traffic. Industrial airparks are commonest in the West and Southwest (Texas already has at least 70), but others are in operation or being planned near such places as St. Louis, Cleveland, Cape Kennedy and Washington, D.C.

Food & Golf. At Dallas' Addison Airpark, six plants are operating, and lots for 45 others have been sold in the park's 75 acres. The park has a mile-long runway that can handle twin-engine jets, is home base for 309 planes. The 703-acre Skywest Park being developed at Hayward, Calif., includes an adjacent 18-hole golf course. Executives of the first company there, Mack Trucks, Inc., soon will be able to fly a visitor to their plant door, feed him in the planned 90-room hotel and restaurant, play a round of golf with him, and fly him back to his office the same day. Outside Washington, a developer is turning the Montgomery County (Md.) airport into an airpark, already has 170 aircraft based there. A golf-cart manufacturer is building beside the airstrip, and IBM, Fairchild Hiller, Sprague Electronics, Bechtel Corp., and the National Bureau of Standards are building nearby.

Such airpark sites are particularly attractive to manufacturers of light, high-value products (such as electronic components) that can be shipped by air, and to construction and research firms whose high-salaried officials must travel often. Many businessmen who locate in airparks pilot the planes themselves. Leroy Lott, a salesman for Bank Building & Equipment Corp., covers Texas and Oklahoma from Addison Airpark, says his Cessna's speed and convenience is about the equivalent of "another salesman working in my territory."

Taxiing Home. Smaller cities, bypassed by the transcontinental jets, see the airpark as a way to attract new light industry. La Crosse, Wis., is building a hundred-acre park next to its municipal airport, and Manchester, N.H., and Lincoln, R.I., both have set up nonprofit trusts to lease sites in their new airparks. Last week Atlanta Industrial Designer H. McKinley Conway Jr., who has planned several airparks, flew to Meridian, Miss., to confer with town officials who want to build one there. There is, of course, still the problem of commuting between home and work--but the Sierra Sky Park in Fresno, Calif., has solved even that. Owners of its 105 residential lots can land on the community airstrip, taxi up to their homes, then park in their own planeport.

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