Sky Harbor: From Farmland to the Eighth Busiest Airport in America

The airport beside you looks like a city. In a sense it has become one, moving fifty million passengers a year through what was, less than a century ago, a wheat field.

J. Parker Van Zandt, the owner of a small charter airline called Scenic Airways, purchased two hundred seventy-eight acres of farmland south of Phoenix in November nineteen twenty-eight. He had a simple vision: a winter base of operations for his aircraft, in a climate where flying could happen year-round. Van Zandt named the place Sky Harbor, and the dedication drew eight thousand people.

The airport's early distinction was not its size but its technology. Despite being a remote private airfield so far from downtown Phoenix that locals called it The Farm, Sky Harbor became the second airport in the country to install a lighted runway, a critical safety advance that allowed operations after dark.

The nineteen twenty-nine stock market crash took Scenic Airways down with it. The airport passed through a holding company before the city of Phoenix purchased it in nineteen thirty-five for one hundred thousand dollars. That one-hundred-thousand-dollar investment now supports an economic engine generating tens of billions of dollars annually for the regional economy.

Phoenix was still a city of under forty thousand people when Van Zandt built his airstrip here. The city that grew around the airport expanded so fast in the postwar decades that Sky Harbor, once impossibly distant from downtown, is now surrounded by urban neighborhoods and sits practically underneath some of the most expensive real estate in the metropolitan area.

By twenty twenty-one, Sky Harbor ranked as the eighth busiest airport in the United States and twenty-second in the world. The farm is long gone. The harbor stayed.