Home Is Where the Hangar Is

Air parks have become a way of life for private-plane owners

For most people, living close to an airport can be nightmarish, a constant affliction of screaming jet engines and shuddering vibration as huge airliners pass overhead. To a special few, a home beside an airport runway is the realization of a cherished dream. These people own their own planes and dwell in "air parks," residential communities organized around a private airstrip, accessible from nearly every home. Residents can park their planes in their front yards or in hangars--some of them two-plane models--adjacent to their houses. "When the kids ask for the keys to go out," says a resident of one airstrip community, "you don't know what keys they mean--for the car or for the airplane."

There are some 40 air parks around the U.S., most of them in California and in the ideally flat farm country around Chicago. But they have also sprung up in Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New York and even New Hampshire. All are operating at full tilt despite the ongoing air controllers' strike. Nineteen-year-old Cameron Airpark, 30 miles east of Sacramento, is an aeronautical paradise of clear skies and steady climate, with little fog or pollution. It consists of a 4,000-ft. paved runway surrounded by 120 half-acre lots that border on 100-ft.-wide, four-lane taxiway-roads with names like Lockheed Drive and Boeing Road. The two center lanes are for cars, the outer two for airplanes. Lots are priced from $35,000 to $80,000. So far, 50 homes valued at $150,000 to $500,000 have been built.

In Florida, Spruce Creek Homes air park is being built around an old World War II Navy landing strip eight miles from Daytona Beach. It will eventually have 2,000 units, including houses and condominiums, plus commercial hangars for apartment dwellers with no access to the taxiways. Many air parks try to maintain the airborne motif throughout the community. At Colorado's 40-home Erie Air Park, near Boulder, the local restaurant is in a converted Convair 990 jetliner, and the "parking lot" out front is actually a taxiway where customers can roll up in their small planes.

Many air park residents are antique-airplane buffs or hobby plane builders. Quite a few also tend to be affiliated with or retired from commercial aviation: some 25 airline pilots live at Cameron and commute--by air, of course--to their jobs at San Francisco International and other area airports. Illinois' Casa de Aero, a 45-home park 38 miles from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, was developed by three airline pilots especially for families like theirs.

Because they live in air parks, owners can use their planes for both work and play, and counter some of the expense by taking a tax deduction for business use. Erie Homeowner Francis Banderet, a construction and farm equipment dealer, sees to his far-flung clients' needs by plane. Robert McDaniels, a retired airline pilot who lives in Naper Aero, near Chicago, owns four planes. One is a 1917 wooden-frame Jenny; another is a two-seater he uses to give flying lessons at a nearby airfield.

The planes do tend to shape their owners' lifestyle, though. "When your husband asks you out to dinner," says Jan Carlsen, a resident of Cameron Airpark, "you don't have to go to the local Taco Bell; you can go to the Carson City Taco Bell." By plane it would be about a half-hour hop; by car, more than two hours, some of it over difficult mountain roads.

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