fly-in community

n.

A housing development situated near an airport that enables homeowners to taxi their planes to their homes and park them there.

Example Citations:

On days when 51-year-old Bob DeLoach feels like visiting his parents in Atlanta, he just strolls out to his garage, hops in his four-seat 1966 Piper Twin Comanche airplane, taxis down to the grass airstrip next to his house and takes off.

It's one of the perks of living in Wellington's Aero Club, one of more than 400 fly-in communities in the country, where homes are built around private airstrips and houses have hangars.

— Sam Tranum, "Private airstrips, new development attracting pilots to fly-in communities," Sun-Sentinel, August 10, 2003

Strange things grow in the swampland of central Florida — including oddball communities. There's Cassadaga, town of psychics; Gibsonton, trailer park of circus freaks; and now Jumbolair, a gated community for owners of honking big jets.

Like geeks and clairvoyants, big-jet owners are a marginalized caste. Witness the persecution of Larry Ellison, who battled San Jose officials in court for a year after they tried to prevent him from landing his Gulfstream V in the middle of the night (Ellison eventually won). Or of John Travolta, chased from a fly-in community near Daytona when neighbors complained that his Gulfstream II was too big and loud.

— Jeff Wise, "Welcome to Jumbolair, a fly-in community where everyone's trying to keep up with the Boeings," Fortune, March 17, 2003

Earliest Citation:

What do you give a special friend for her 65th birthday? Why, you invite her to your house for lunch, and then afterwards, head out back where your private airplane is waiting in the hanger that is attached to your house. Then you taxi out to the runway that is just behind your house, and fly off for a tour of the Statue of Liberty and other New York City high spots seen virtually eye-to-eye at 500 feet.

This is not a fantasy, but the actual gift presented to a friend recently by Joseph Somers, a Hartford developer who is now living in the first of what he expects will be 16 luxury homes built around an old landing strip in Marlborough, Conn. Called Somerset Fly-in-Community, it is, according to Mr. Somers, the first housing development in the New York region to offer airplane owners the convenience of an adjacent airfield.

— "Connecticut's backyard airport," The New York Times, October 17, 1982

Related Words:

aerotropolis

gater

golden ghetto

privatopia

splitters

vasectomy zoning

yuppie slum

Categories:

Housing and Architecture

Lifestyles

Aviation