The History of Mattituck Airport

Found in the City of Southold on Lengthy Island’s North Fork, Mattituck Air Base (21N) is the area’s only privately owned, community-use airfield, occupying 18 acres and offering a solitary 2,200- by 60-foot asphalt runway-in this scenario, 1/19. Strategies to the 1st of the two magnetic headings are conducted in excess of the Terrific Peconic Bay.

Set up in 1946 just after Parker Wickham returned from his Globe War II responsibility of keeping Army Air Corps airplanes at his Mojave Desert base, he was offered 16 acres of his father’s farm for an airfield immediately after his return home, because, in accordance to his father’s assessment, “There’s no revenue in potatoes, anyhow.” Before the asphalt, the “runway” was very little additional than a strip of moved grass.

Apart from its use by private pilots who have been ready to land and base their aircraft in close proximity to their North Fork residences, its principle, earnings-producing factor was its motor fix and overhaul facility, which was marketed in 1984, repurchased by spouse and children associates four many years afterwards, and sold all over again in 1999 to Teledyne-Continental, which renamed it Teledyne-Mattituck Expert services on November 9 of that 12 months.

As just one of the northeast’s longest set up piston engine overhaul restore retailers, it operated as a subsidiary of Teledyne Systems, Inc., leasing the developing from the Wickham spouse and children. It was subsequently bought by China-primarily based AVIC Intercontinental, at which time it was renamed Mattituck Providers, utilizing 70 at a time during its peak, or some 350 for each annum, and was accountable for at the very least a dozen engines for every 7 days, or additional than 500 for every yr.

Continental Motors detailed its activities as “motor overhauls built to factory assistance tolerances manufacturing facility motor sales and set up experts key powerplant and airframe routine maintenance propeller maintenance and fix your in-inventory source for sections 50-hour, 100-hour, and once-a-year inspections inspection fix programs and gas system calibration and changes.”

For the 12 months ended on September 27, 2007, the single-strip Mattituck Airport averaged 33 actions per day, or 12,200 for every calendar year, and counted 32 solitary-motor centered aircraft.

Immediately after Parker Wickham handed in 2011, he ceded ownership to his son, Jay, and his spouse, Cyndi, who maintained and operated the airfield for five many years. But a drop in basic aviation because of to its ever-increasing expenditures, leaving only a handful of airplanes nonetheless centered there, and the closing of the repair service shop in the summer months of 2012, still left him small alternative but to promote the airport 4 yrs later, an intention he announced on June 3, 2016. Because of highly-priced repairs, its gasoline tanks had presently been presented to Albertson Marine, Inc., of Southold.

The Continental Motors’ shop itself, closed immediately after four many years of declining standard aviation company and its incapacity to continue being lucrative with two individual services, was integrated with its Fairhope, Alabama, plant.

“Quite bluntly, I feel each of us and Lycoming have completed a very good occupation of pointing out the price of manufacturing facility choices and that has produced a contribution throughout the board to the decline there,” in accordance to Rhett Ross, Continental Motors’ CEO. “It was not an simple final decision, but that facility has been marginal for at least the fifty percent ten years.”

All 20 remaining workforce have been laid off.

While the Town of Southold deemed the acquire charge-prohibitive and its profits likely minimum, “saviors” arrived in the variety of Paul Pawlowski and Steve Marsh, companions in the Hudson City Savings Financial institution venture on Main Highway in Mattituck. Advising present pilots to take away their plane by September 30 of 2016, they supposed to excavate the runway and demolish all buildings, with the exception of the carriage home, the automobile barn, and the newest hangars, but usually hold the airfield as it had been.