Situated in the Town of Southold on Extended Island’s North Fork, Mattituck Air Foundation (21N) is the area’s only privately owned, general public-use airfield, occupying 18 acres and giving a single 2,200- by 60-foot asphalt runway-in this case, 1/19. Strategies to the initial of the two magnetic headings are performed around the Excellent Peconic Bay.
Founded in 1946 just after Parker Wickham returned from his Environment War II responsibility of protecting Army Air Corps airplanes at his Mojave Desert foundation, he was provided 16 acres of his father’s farm for an airfield immediately after his return dwelling, since, according to his father’s evaluation, “There is certainly no funds in potatoes, anyhow.” Before the asphalt, the “runway” was very little much more than a strip of moved grass.
Apart from its use by non-public pilots who ended up equipped to land and foundation their plane around their North Fork residences, its basic principle, profits-generating factor was its engine restore and overhaul facility, which was marketed in 1984, repurchased by spouse and children members four several years later, and bought yet again in 1999 to Teledyne-Continental, which renamed it Teledyne-Mattituck Companies on November 9 of that calendar year.
As just one of the northeast’s longest recognized piston motor overhaul mend shops, it operated as a subsidiary of Teledyne Systems, Inc., leasing the setting up from the Wickham relatives. It was subsequently procured by China-centered AVIC Global, at which time it was renamed Mattituck Products and services, using 70 at a time during its peak, or some 350 per annum, and was liable for at minimum a dozen engines for every 7 days, or much more than 500 per calendar year.
Continental Motors outlined its functions as “motor overhauls designed to factory services tolerances factory engine gross sales and set up professionals significant powerplant and airframe servicing propeller servicing and mend your in-inventory resource for sections 50-hour, 100-hour, and yearly inspections inspection mend applications and gasoline technique calibration and changes.”
For the 12 months ended on September 27, 2007, the single-strip Mattituck Airport averaged 33 actions for every day, or 12,200 per yr, and counted 32 one-motor based plane.
Just after Parker Wickham passed in 2011, he ceded ownership to his son, Jay, and his wife, Cyndi, who managed and operated the airfield for five decades. But a decrease in normal aviation because of to its ever-mounting fees, leaving only a handful of airplanes however based there, and the closing of the repair store in the summer of 2012, still left him little decision but to promote the airport 4 many years later on, an intention he introduced on June 3, 2016. For the reason that of high-priced repairs, its gas tanks had now been specified to Albertson Maritime, Inc., of Southold.
The Continental Motors’ shop by itself, shut right after 4 decades of declining typical aviation enterprise and its incapacity to keep on being worthwhile with two different services, was built-in with its Fairhope, Alabama, plant.
“Incredibly bluntly, I assume both equally of us and Lycoming have carried out a good position of pointing out the benefit of manufacturing facility alternatives and that has created a contribution across the board to the decrease there,” according to Rhett Ross, Continental Motors’ CEO. “It was not an uncomplicated conclusion, but that facility has been marginal for at the very least the fifty percent ten years.”
All 20 remaining workers were laid off.
Though the City of Southold deemed the invest in price-prohibitive and its income potential small, “saviors” came in the type of Paul Pawlowski and Steve Marsh, associates in the Hudson City Discounts Lender job on Primary Road in Mattituck. Advising present pilots to remove their plane by September 30 of 2016, they meant to excavate the runway and demolish all buildings, with the exception of the carriage household, the car barn, and the most recent hangars, but or else hold the airfield as it experienced been.