Sky Harbour is to go ahead with the development of its next home base hangar campus at Chicago Executive Airport airport.
Sky Harbour is developing a network of up to 50 home base campuses for business and private aircraft in the USA. The company develops, then leases and manages the general aviation hangars.
The 25-acre Sky Harbour campus at Chicago Executive Airport (PWK) will be built in three phases, is expected to create hundreds of local jobs and to generate around US$550MM in economic benefits.
The first phase of the project will take 24-36 months to build and include with seven to eight hangars, offices and space for ground support equipment over 130,000 square feet at PWK. The plans include building a new ramp built and closing an old runway, although the project does not rely on decommissioning the runway. It will also displace some existing tenants at the airport.
Sky Harbour’s home base campus will offers storage for twenty of the local area’s corporate and privately-owned business jets in private hangars, with line-services dedicated exclusively to based tenants that will offer “the shortest time to wheels-up in business aviation, said Sky Harbour.
The campus at PWK is Sky Harbour’s seventh. The company has campuses at Houston, Nashville, and Miami and sites under development at Denver, Phoenix and Dallas.
PWK is the leading general aviation airport in the Chicago area and accepts around 100,000 aircraft annually. It is located 10 miles (16km) north of O’Hare and has three FBOs on site, Signature, Atlantic and Hawthorne.
Speaking at the NBAA-BACE event this week in Las Vegas, Nevada, Eric Stolpman vice president of real estate at Sky Harbour said, “Chicago has long been a hotbed for business aviation and as a reliever airport for O’Hare handles tens of thousands of flights every year.
“The airport and the market in Chicago suffers from a shortage of hangar space. It is at 100% capacity and Sky Harbour believes PWK is well poised to capture the demand for business aviation and based aircraft over the coming years.
“This is one of the largest investments in the city and the at airport for many years.”
Jeff Miller, executive director of Chicago Executive Airport said, “Our market has exploded since Covid. We are the number one airport in Illinois for repositioned flights. Sky Harbour are not a traditional FBO, they will not cannibalize existing traffic, the extra storage capacity will complement our existing offering.”
Atlantic Aviation began a project to build a 25,000 square foot hangar at PWK in 2021.
