Why it matters
The Scottsdale Airport and the Airpark around it are where the city goes to work: roughly 2,900 businesses and 51,000 jobs on 8.6 square miles between Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101, the city’s largest employment center and among the two or three largest in Arizona, all grown from a runway the Army graded on alfalfa ground in 1942.
The arrangement is unusual. The city owns the airport, a single 8,249-foot runway with about 400 based aircraft, 166,588 takeoffs and landings in 2024, and no airline. Private developers own everything around it, and from the beginning the lots nearest the runway came with gates onto the taxiways, so a company could keep its jet behind its office. That idea came from a Kansas City architect working for a church in 1963, and the city, which had just annexed the site to keep it from Phoenix, said yes.
Where to find it today
The Aviation Business Center, 15000 N. Airport Drive, opened in late 2018 with a public viewing deck, the Volanti restaurant and, at the gate, the Thunderbird Field II Veterans Memorial with its 1942 Stearman.
The grid. The North Scottsdale guide covers the Airpark’s restaurants and traffic; the older streets west of the runway still follow the airfield’s angles.
The edges. Scottsdale Quarter, built in 2009 where Armour-Dial’s research center stood, and the Kierland district across Scottsdale Road are where the Airpark eats and shops.
Not here: your airline flight. The Phoenix airport guide explains the drive from Sky Harbor.
How it started
The runway came first, for the Army’s reasons. Thunderbird Field II opened on June 22, 1942, eleven miles north of a farm town of about two thousand people, run by Leland Hayward and John Connelly’s Southwest Airways under Army Air Forces supervision. More than 5,500 cadets soloed in Stearman biplanes before the Army closed it in October 1944. Arizona State College ran a trade school there until 1951. In 1953 the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists bought the field and roughly 600 acres around it, moved its Thunderbird Academy into the barracks, turned the hangars into a woodworking shop, trained missionary pilots and let private flyers land on the unimproved strip, with no tower.
Two pressures converged in the early 1960s. The Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce had wanted a municipal airport since the 1950s, and Phoenix was studying county land north of Scottsdale for a satellite airport. Under Mayor Bill Schrader, Scottsdale annexed the field and the McDowell foothills in 1962 and 1963; Phoenix sued over the annexation map and lost. Meanwhile the church, whose “temporary” 1942 buildings were wearing out, hired George Tewksbury, an architect and planner from Kansas City, in 1963 to redevelop its land. Tewksbury optioned 642 acres including the airstrip, formed Landel Inc., and proposed giving the runway to the city while developing the rest as a private Thunderbird Industrial Airpark whose lots would open onto the taxiways. In January 1965 the city’s STEP citizen committees put a 5,000-foot municipal runway on their wish list.
The neighbors fought it for three years. The Desert Estates Property Owners Association argued noise, traffic, safety and property values, and questioned whether a city should accept 201 acres from a developer with an obvious interest. In 1964 there were six houses within a mile of the planned airport. After hearings and compromises, including a limit to “garden-style” light and clean industry, zoning passed. On July 12, 1966 the city took title to the 201-acre field for $750,000, money that, as City Manager Bill Donaldson told the Scottsdale Daily Progress, “was given to Scottsdale by Landel Inc., which plans to develop industrial sites around the new airport.” Mayor Bud Tims broke ground that September. The first fixed-base operator was chosen in April 1967, the airport opened on June 16, 1967, and the first business jets landed in August.
The decisions that locked it in
Jets, from the start. A municipal field could have been a light-plane and flight-school airport. Scottsdale courted corporate jets in its first summer and built a small terminal in 1968 to receive them, which made the airport a business asset rather than a hobby field and made every later argument about noise an argument about jets.
The industrial park as the point. Casa Precision, a maker of aircraft and missile parts, opened in June 1968 as the first Airpark tenant; by December 1971 Tewksbury had sold 22 industrial lots at 60 cents to a dollar a square foot, with paved taxiways and city water and sewer. Even a restaurant, the Hungry Cowboy at Butherus and 75th, needed long hearings under the light-industry zoning. In 1976 Armour-Dial opened its research and development center on Scottsdale Road at Greenway-Hayden, the first blue-chip tenant, and the restriction to clean manufacturing quietly gave way to offices, then headquarters, then hotels and retail. Jim Keeley of Colliers began counting in the 1980s: 316 businesses and 4,038 employees in 1983, 1,624 businesses and 19,837 employees in 1997, about 52,000 jobs in 2013. Dial moved its headquarters to the Airpark in the 1990s; its old research site became Scottsdale Quarter in 2009. Discount Tire, GoDaddy, Vanguard, Barrett-Jackson, Axon and the Scottsdale Airpark News, publishing since 1981, all made the grid their address.
No airline. In 1989 StatesWest Airlines flew 19-seat turboprops from Scottsdale to Orange County. The route died in 1990, and no airline has tried since. The FAA classifies Scottsdale as a reliever airport, built to pull small and corporate aircraft away from Sky Harbor, and the city has never built an airline terminal, which kept the Airpark a business-aviation economy rather than a passenger one.
The 2002 freeway and the 2018 terminal. The Loop 101 Pima Freeway, completed through Scottsdale in April 2002, turned a northern cul-de-sac into a regional hub. Sixteen years later the city replaced the 1968 terminal with a $27 million Aviation Business Center, two 30,000-square-foot hangars, a restaurant and the veterans memorial, financed by bond and opened in November 2018. The airport’s 2024 revenue of about $9.4 million against $3.3 million in operating costs goes back into capital projects, not the general fund.
The years it nearly ended
The runway’s fragile years were 1944 to 1966, when it was a church’s spare asset with no tower and no plan; had the conference sold to a subdivider, the Airpark would not exist. The airport project itself nearly died in the zoning hearings of 1963 to 1966, and the compromise that saved it, light industry only, was abandoned over the following decades without a comparable fight. Since 1967 the airport has faced no existential threat, though two 2025 accidents, a Learjet that killed one person on February 10 and a runway overrun on April 21, reminded the city what a jet port in a business district risks.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1965 STEP recommendation asked for a modest municipal airport; the 1966 zoning promised the neighbors a garden-style park of clean, light industry. What exists is one of the busiest corporate-jet airports in the country and a mixed-use district with more jobs than downtown, which the city now describes in terms of headquarters, retail, hotels, nonprofits, technology companies and government offices. The city’s 2025 study of aviation-related activity alone found 5,171 jobs and $1.086 billion in output; the broader Airpark economy is many times that.
The shift was driven by developers and welcomed by every mayor from Tims to Jim Lane, and the constituency changed with it, from pilots and machinists to the Valley’s office workforce. The one promise that held is the oddest: no airline. JSX’s move from Sky Harbor on January 10, 2024, selling seats on 30-seat Embraer jets under public-charter rules that skip airline security and gates, is the first real test of that in thirty-five years. The city says noise is not part of its permitting process; the FAA is reviewing the public-charter rules; the neighbors filed more than 500 complaints in six months.
Who the record leaves out
Desert Estates. The homeowners who opposed the airport in 1963 to 1966 were right about the noise and wrong about the property values, and their side survives only in a 1964 newspaper and a 1986 city report cited by a local historian. They are the ancestors of every noise complaint since: 15,589 in 2005, the Airpark’s boom year, and 691 in 2024. Federal law has put their core demand, a mandatory curfew, out of reach since 1990.
Thunderbird Academy. The church school that kept the runway alive for thirteen years still operates beside the airport. Its students lost their airstrip in 1966; what they got, beyond a rebuilt campus financed by land sales, is not in the record.
The farmers of 1942. The Army took alfalfa and cotton ground to build the field. Whose land it was and what they were paid, we did not find.
The workforce. Fifty-one thousand jobs with almost no housing inside the grid means the Airpark empties every evening down the Loop 101 and Shea Boulevard. Its publications celebrate its companies; the commuting lives of its workers are documented nowhere we found.
The cadets who washed out, and the British and Chinese trainees who flew beside Americans at Thunderbird II, have no place in the memorial’s story.
What it didn’t have to become
The taxiway gate. Tewksbury’s 1963 plan, lots that open directly onto the airfield, was the thing the FAA resisted and the neighbors feared, and it is the one feature that made the Airpark more than an industrial park near a runway. Without it Scottsdale would have had a municipal airport like a hundred others and a business park like a thousand others, and the headquarters that chose the Airpark for the convenience of their jets would have chosen Tempe or the Camelback Corridor. The alternatives were on the table: no airport, as Desert Estates wanted; a city-only field without the private park; or a park without airside access. The city took the developer’s money and the developer’s idea, and the runway cadets soloed on in 1943 became the organizing principle of its economy.