DIY: FTCA Flying Site

A while back Lee asked me to write an article about my experiences with creating an FTCA flying site. It sounded like a great idea, but I wasn't quite ready to sit down and type it out, I felt like the field situation wasn't quite finished enough to justify writing the article. Well, it's been five months since the field was approved, we've been flying on it for over four of those months. Flying season is drawing to a close here in Florida, while it's just really beginning in the rest of the country. I'm sure there will be community members returning to fields that maybe they're not quite happy with for any number of reasons. So I suppose if people are going to want some ideas on how to get their own flying sites established, now is the time to share what I've learned.


First of all, I'm not going to try to tell you how to go about getting your own flying field. There's plenty of ways to go about it that are different than what worked for me. I had plenty of good timing and even better luck on my side, as well as a lot of good relationships built over years that helped pave the way. With that said, the most important part of getting a flying site, is finding the right location. So we'll start with that.

If you happen to own a wide patch of land, cleared and ready to fly from, then you're pretty much done! Get up with Lee, tell him you want to use your land as a flying site, and I'm sure he'll be happy to work with you on declaring it an FTCA friendly flying location. The FAA hasn't begun recognizing FRIAs at the time that I'm writing this, so making a FTCA site is mostly a formality at the moment. But for the rest of us, we're going to have to get permission to use someone else's property to make into a flying site.

I started with people I knew. A friend of mine had the land, but he had a lot of neighbors that may have posed a problem through complaints about model planes and drones flying over their houses. Another friend owns a farm, and this may have been a viable option. It was remote, with few neighbors. But the farm is a business. Any portion of land cleared of crops to put in a runway was money out of his pocket. This could be recouped through a paid lease for the land used, and that's an option to consider. Unfortunately for me, there wasn't a lot of pilots in my immediate area that I was aware of. Which meant I'd be personally responsible for any lease fees, as well as site development costs without any other pilots to share the expenses with.

The last option I considered was public land. I live in a fairly rural county that holds several parcels of property. With this in mind, I went to the county property appraiser website and did a search for properties owned by the county. Most were too small, or too wooded to be of any use. Finally I found one that fit the needs of a flying site! There was an old landfill that was still cleared of trees, fenced in, and out away from any residential areas.

I contacted a county commissioner that I had a working relationship with.  As luck would have it, the land was within his district.  I gave him the abbreviated version of what I was hoping to do, and he told me to bring the idea before the board.   By "before the board" he meant go to a county board meeting and present my proposal for the board to vote on.  For someone with stage fright this may be a deal breaker.  I do public speaking as part of my job, and I still found the idea somewhat intimidating.  I spent days working on putting together an official sounding proposal.  I typed it up and added images of nearby flying sites, including one that was using an old landfill.  I wrote about the benefits of STEM programs, Flite Test, and the threat of restrictions to recreational flying by the FAA.  I had a speech prepared and I practiced it with my wife and coworkers.  Finally the day of the meeting arrived.  I've been to plenty of county meetings.  They're usually sparsely attended events, quiet and low key.  Of course my luck did not extend this far.  Apparently there was some controversy that had drawn a larger than usual crowd, so my audience was much larger than I had expected.  I abbreviated my speech, kept it simple and to the point.  The commissioners were pleased with the idea, and were ready to approve it, but then the county attorney commented.  He had concerns about insurance and liability.  He wanted to research it some before he could give his nod for the idea.  So the topic was tabled, and I was invited to bring it back before the board at a future meeting.

I'll admit it was frustrating. A positive note to the evening was the amount of support audience members showed me. Several people approached me after the meeting to say they thought it was a good idea. This certainly helped with the confidence about going forward with the proposal. Fast forward a couple weeks and I was back at another meeting. The attorney found that if the project was treated as a county park, then the existing insurance would cover the county's needs. One commissioner had expressed concerns about signage, hours, and access. Mostly wanting to make sure the property could be secured to keep ATV use out of the area, and something showing the use hours. With those details agreed upon, permission was given to use the property as a model flying site.

The site itself still needed quite a bit of work. The field had not been mowed in quite some time. There was one main gate right at the road. It doesn't allow for anyone to park and walk in, so that was something I wanted to fix. I bought fence and fence posts, loaded the push mower in the back of my truck and got to work. I cleared an outline of where I thought the runway should go, and I started installing the posts and fence. The county commissioner I initially spoke with showed up one day with his tractor, and mowed the road in, and the runway. He also arranged to have the road crew cut a dirt strip in with the road grader. You can't ask for much more of a show of support than that!

Within short order we had ourselves a flying field.

The "we" is the sticky part sor far. This wasn't started as a club effort. There's no organized group of people that was waiting for a flying site to open up, and all jumped in to get it done. I'm working more along the Kevin Costner philosophy of "build it and they will come". Right now there's a few people who regularly will use the flying site when the weather is nice, but I'm working to get more. As we grow, we can add improvements to the site. So, now that there's somewhere to fly, I'm working on more community outreach. I've set up a booth at a local county street festival. Thanks to Lee at the FTCA I had several Flite Test STEM gliders to give to kids so they could build them at the local EAA chapter Young Eagles day they held this month. June I'm scheduled to work with the local library talking about model aviation and drones, and they remaining gliders will get handed out and assembled there too.

In conclusion, I'm excited.  The process wasn't nearly as daunting as I had expected.  I'd love to see people who don't have flying sites, strike out on their own and get them.  Or people in clubs that have more members than space, take the leap and expand that club or start a new one.  As I said, land is always the challenge, but it's there if you know where to look.  It may not be large enough for quarter scale gassers, but maybe you can find a place that would suit small park fliers, or UMX planes if that's all that's available.  Also, don't limit yourself to fixed wing sites.  Establish places to fly for helicopters and drones.  We're losing more sites than we're gaining, and sometimes it seems the existing clubs would rather die off, than expand with something new.  Not to mention, if the FAA rules are ever enforced as they have been written, we're going to need to have these sites established before they'll recognize them as protected flying locations.  Don't wait for someone else to do it for you, it's achievable, if I can do it, anyone can.