What it means
Scottsdale Airport is the runway in the middle of the Airpark, owned by the city and used by people who own, rent or charter their own aircraft. Locals say “Scottsdale Airport,” “the airport up by the Airpark,” or, among pilots, “SDL.” When a local says “the airport” without a qualifier, though, they mean Sky Harbor, and that is the first rule of the word: Scottsdale Airport is a real airport that almost no visitor will use.
You hear the name most in February. During the Phoenix Open and car week the ramp fills with business jets, the television stations film them landing, and the airport becomes the celebrity entrance to the city. The rest of the year it is flight schools, corporate jets, medical flights and the public-charter airline JSX, which flies from a hangar on Airport Drive.
The full story, from the 1942 Army field to the 1966 purchase and the Airpark’s 50,000 jobs, is in the Scottsdale Airport and Airpark profile. This page is about the name and what it does and does not mean.
Where you’ll meet it
On rideshare apps, where it is the most common wrong destination for an arriving tourist; on noise-abatement maps when you buy a house in the north; in Phoenix Open coverage; and on JSX bookings, under a code, SCF, that matches neither the city nor the FAA identifier.
Where the word came from
The runway came first and the name later. On June 22, 1942 the Army opened Thunderbird Field II here, a primary flight school run by Southwest Airways that graduated more than 5,500 cadets before it closed in October 1944; its story is in the Thunderbird Field II guide. After the war the strip passed through Arizona State’s aviation program and a Seventh-day Adventist school before the city took title in July 1966. It opened as Scottsdale Municipal Airport on June 16, 1967, and the “Municipal” has quietly dropped out of everyday use since. Today the city calls it simply Scottsdale Airport.
The codes are where people get lost. The FAA’s location identifier is SDL, the one pilots and the city use. The international airline-industry code is SCF, assigned separately, which is why JSX’s booking site lists “Scottsdale (SCF)”. The ICAO code, used in flight plans, is KSDL.
Then there is the word “Airpark,” which locals use for the whole district around the runway. The airport is the city-owned field; the Airpark is the private business park and job center that grew up on the land around it because tenants wanted a taxiway to their door.
What it is not
It is not an airline airport. A commuter carrier, StatesWest, tried scheduled flights in 1989 and gave up within months, and JSX, which arrived in January 2024, sells seats on what is legally a public charter. If your ticket was bought from an airline, you are landing at Sky Harbor, or possibly at Mesa Gateway.
The fine print
The numbers from the record: one runway, designated 3/21, 8,249 feet by 100 feet; 175,826 takeoffs and landings in 2023 and 356 based aircraft, which puts it among the busiest single-runway general-aviation airports in the country. The city’s own economic analysis credits the airport with almost $1.1 billion in activity and 5,171 jobs, a figure separate from the much larger Airpark employment count in the profile.
Two practical facts with dates. First, the city has scheduled pavement work on the runway: overnight closures from 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, October 18 to 23, 2026, and a full closure from the evening of October 24 through October 31, per the airport’s page as of October 2. Second, the airport does handle international arrivals for private aircraft, with U.S. Customs on site, which is part of why the jet traffic is what it is.
JSX’s network from the field, as listed on its booking site in October 2026, includes Las Vegas, Burbank, Orange County, Carlsbad, Santa Monica, Denver, Dallas Love Field and a Los Cabos route announced to start in October 2026. Fares on that page started at $199 one way to Las Vegas; the pitch is the hangar check-in. Driverless Waymo rides also reach the Airpark, according to the company’s August 2026 expansion announcement.