Neighborhood Flying

When Buddy Johnson was growing up in the 1960s, Baytown, Texas, consisted of rice and soybean farms as far as he could see. The agricultural landscape remained largely unchanged until 1980, when his dad, R.W. Johnson, bought 320 acres adjacent to their home and developed it as an airpark: a place where the pilot of every house on the grounds could nearly fall out of bed into his or her airplane.

RWJ Airpark, almost an hour’s drive east of Houston, was the first of its kind in the area. It features 98 residential lots, more than half accessible to the runways. Unlike most airparks, Johnson said, RWJ was built to include a fixed-base operation (FBO), with an office, hangars, fuel, and maintenance services right on the grounds.

At first, many crop dusters utilized the fields. As residential and commercial development encroached and farms disappeared, the pilots living on the property changed, too. Residents now include recreational aviators and corporate pilots for nearby gas and chemical companies—“a wide range of GA usage,” Johnson said. Many other pilots and their passengers fly in to do business with the Wal-Mart distribution center a few miles away.

The airpark’s FBO now contains 13 T-hangars and four large community hangars, with another 30 hangars or so in the rest of the airpark.

Jim Kubik, who has lived at the airpark for 15 years, said that for people like himself who love aviation, living at an airpark is as understandable as golfers residing near the eighteenth hole or sport fishermen living right at the water’s edge.

“I like airplanes. I cannot imagine why anyone with a plane does not want to live at the airpark,” said Kubik, who owns a company that repairs parts at nearby petrochemical plants. Kubik flies his Maule M-4 recreationally several times a week.

“We had young kids when we moved there,” Kubik said. “My wife didn’t particularly care where the house was, so she got her house, I got the airport, and the kids got good schools. Everybody won.”

Johnson explained that “the whole purpose” of developing RWJ Airpark “was so people could build their houses around the airport, taxi from their property straight onto the runway, and go.”

Almost until his death in March 2009, R.W. rode out in his golf cart to greet pilots, since the aviation scene “was a big part of his life,” Johnson said.

His late father viewed the facility “as providing the public a service in the airport itself,” Johnson added, and took satisfaction in creating “a residential community, giving the public the opportunity to buy land on the airport and be able to live near what they enjoy doing.”

Residents “come home from work, open the hangar, and there they are,” Johnson said. “It’s a unique concept for people who like aviation. You can do it any evening of the week you want to because it’s right in your backyard. It’s a convenience thing. Guys like to piddle around on their planes, work on them with their neighbors. We have fly-ins. It’s just sort of a different approach to aviation.”

Johnson believes, too, that the airpark and GA, generally, contribute to the local economy. As an example, he mentioned his own work that day. Johnson was speaking by cellular phone from a Gulfstream 450 that he flies for a local charter company. He had transported two businessmen who work for a Houston oil and gas company to Memphis, Tenn., and was waiting for them to conclude their meetings so he could fly them home.

“We left Houston at 10 this morning, and we’ll be back by 2 [or] 3 p.m. No way can you conduct business on a commercial airline in the time frame you need. [GA serves] to provide that access to the private sector that doesn’t want to fly commercial airlines day in and day out,” Johnson said. “It saves time, and time is money. If you’re going to use it, you have to have a place to land. That’s what the airpark offers. It’s a convenience tool for a certain part of the Houston area.”

—By Hillel Kuttler
—Photo Credit: RWJ Airpark