Flying, Golfing and Living. All in the Same Place. - The New York Times

When she was 8 years old, Laura Lyne’s father bought a small airplane to fly himself to business appointments. By the time she turned 17 and had her own pilot’s license she had seen more of the world than many American girls, having flown with her father, McKinley Conway, across the Americas.

“We went into big cities and little cities, really dots on the map,” Ms. Lyne, now 71, said.

Soon, Ms. Lyne was her father’s co-pilot and they shared not just a love of flying but an affection for golf. They played at the courses they discovered as they traveled and kept a log of out-of-the-way airfields they visited. In the late ’60s, Mr. Conway had his big idea to turn an unused military airfield near Daytona Beach, Fla., into Spruce Creek, a fly-in community with homes, businesses, golf courses and parks all situated around the runway.

“The idea you could taxi your plane to your house appealed to him immensely,” Ms. Lyne said.

Decades later, Mr. Conway’s vision has been realized in dozens of residential communities in North America, Europe and Australia, only a few include golf courses. At those that do, homeowners like Jim and Kathy Stone taxi their planes to their backyard hangars and drive their golf carts to the greens.

“We drive our golf carts 98 percent of the time,” Mr. Stone, a retired UPS pilot, said of his life at Spruce Creek, envisioned first by Mr. Conway so many years ago.

“The person who said there are golf courses everywhere in Florida, that’s true, but until you’ve experienced the convenience of driving two minutes to the golf club and you don’t have the hassle of having to drive somewhere, well, convenience is the top three reasons we like it here,” Mr. Stone said.

To attract both pilots and golfers, fly-in communities (also called airparks) must offer a wide range of amenities to home buyers with high expectations, said Vivek Sharma, who has worked with two fly-in communities in Canada.

“I won’t say that golf is associated only with affluent people, but most of the affluent clientele do golf. So when you are talking about a residential air strip community, the golf seamlessly fits in,” said Mr. Sharma, now the chief executive of Fairmont Hot Springs Resort in British Columbia.

Fairmont has 15 home sites along the taxiways and plans 10 more. It has two 18-hole and one nine-hole golf course, a pool, hot spring and skiing.

Mabel Lake Golf and Airpark in Enderby, British Columbia, 200-miles west, has a nine-hole course, a marina and more than 50 homes that back onto the grass airstrip.

Ray and Sue Lewis, both of whom are pilots, moved to Pecan Plantation in 2005.Credit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times

The largest fly-in golf community appears to be Pecan Plantation in Granbury, Texas, a little under an hour’s drive southwest of Fort Worth. It has 3,100 homes, two runways and two golf courses, a country club, tennis courts and a equestrian center.

“We haven’t done any marketing studies on a broad scale,” said Jim Anthony, founder of Plantation Orchards, developer of the community. Prospective home buyers visit from all over, Mr. Anthony said. “It’s been good for us.”

Sue and Ray Lewis, both of whom are pilots, moved to Pecan Plantation in 2005. They have a hangar behind their house where they keep their Beechcraft Bonanza and Ms. Lewis, a lifelong golfer, appreciates the choice of courses.

Even though nonflying residents far outnumber pilots, there are many neighbors who share their interests, Ms. Lewis said. And their lives include plenty of non-aeronautical activities, though everyone seems to enjoy the community’s air shows.

“During Presidents’ Day and Veterans Day and all the holidays, there’s a group of Bonanzas that do flyovers,” said Ms. Lewis. Her husband is at the controls of one of them.

Grant Metsger and his granddaughter Macy Newman in his Cessna.

Living around aviation can trigger an interest in flying. Linda and Grant Metsger keep a Cessna in the hangar of their Pecan Plantation home and when their granddaughter Macy Newman visits, Mr. Metsger teaches her to fly. This spring, the 17-year-old soloed for the first time. Ginger Jabour, a retired Air Force colonel who lives in Spruce Creek, waited until she was 58 to take flying lessons after spending winters at the airpark, with her husband, Jay.

“This place is full of pilots,” Col. Jabour said. “I said to myself, ‘if everybody here is a pilot, dammit, I’m going to be a pilot too.’” Now, the Jabours’ garage holds his and her airplanes.

The development of Spruce Creek, Pecan Plantation and Washington State’s Desert Aire ran on parallel tracks, originating in the late ’60s, which were “boom times” for private pilots in North America.

Recreational flying is not as common in other countries and this is one reason airpark communities with and without golf courses are concentrated in North America. For the past decade Rafael Oreamuno has been selling phase one of Pacific Airpark Costa Rica, 50 hangar homes in Aranjuez, Puntarenas, west of the capital city of San Jose.

Local pilots have expressed interest, Mr. Oreamuno said, but the pool of domestic fliers is not large enough to fill the place. He is lobbying civil aviation authorities to relax restrictions on keeping foreign-registered planes at the community airport. If he is successful, a golf course may become part of the plan.

Ray and Sue Lewis have a hangar behind their house where they keep their Beechcraft Bonanza.Credit...Cooper Neill for The New York Times

Complaints about airplane noise and pollution are fewer in fly-in communities, still problems can arise. “We suggest you don’t come in after 10 p.m. or leave before 7 a.m., to be respectful,” said Marcia Gitelman, a commercial pilot and former member of the Spruce Creek airport authority. She remembers a dispute in the ’90s when neighbors decided that the jet of the airpark’s most famous resident, John Travolta, was too big and too noisy. A lawsuit ensued.

Mr. Travolta ultimately moved to Jumbolair Aviation Estates, a nearby airpark that now uses the tagline, “Bring your Boeing.” And indeed, the 7,550-foot paved runway, which is part of Jumbolair, a larger real estate development of homes, hangars and related businesses, can accommodate a Boeing 737 business jet, said Bartow McDonald, a commercial real estate broker. Mr. Travolta brought the 737 to Jumbolair for the filming of an episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage” in 2019. Travolta has been known to keep his Boeing 707 and smaller jets at his home on the taxiway.

Jumbolair has a mansion, stables, a warehouse complex, hangars, luxury homes and one of the longest private runways in America, Mr. McDonald says, but no golf course, though it could have one soon.

That’s because Jumbolair, which is for sale, shares a property line with Adena Golf and Country Club, a former quarry that, according to the Ocala News, cost more than $50 million to convert into an 18-hole course with clubhouse and luxury home sites in 2015. Adena is also on the market and representatives of both properties say they have had inquiries from people who see the symbiosis.

“There has always been a vision for combining both of the properties to make a truly world-class resort neighborhood,” said Mr. McDonald, who has the Jumbolair listing.

Fifty years ago, when Mr. Conway hired Bill Amick to design Spruce Creek’s golf course, the architect expected it would be the first of many similar projects, but that did not happen.

“I’m surprised that more housing developers have not grabbed onto the fly-in approach,” Mr. Amick said. “To me that seemed workable yesterday, today and in the future.”

But golf courses require lots of land, as do runways so it is exponentially more difficult to acquire, build and maintain a fly-in/golf community.

For those with the vision to establish these communities decades ago, however, business appears to be good.

At Desert Aire, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the P.G.A. head golf professional Don Tracy says more airfield home lots are being added to keep up with demand while the golf course is setting record highs in greens fees revenue.

Proving to Ms. Lyne’s satisfaction that when it came to putting golf, planes and homes together her father was right half a century ago.

“He knew he would enjoy it,” Ms. Lyne said of her father’s idea, “and he thought others would too.”

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