Thomas P. Stafford Airport is a city-owned, public-use

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial Aviation, air transport. They usually consist of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surf ...

located two

nautical mile A nautical mile is a unit of length used in air, marine, and space navigation, and for the definition of territorial waters. Historically, it was defined as the meridian arc length corresponding to one minute ( of a degree) of latitude at t ...

s (4 km) northeast of the

central business district A central business district (CBD) is the Commerce, commercial and business center of a city. It contains commercial space and offices, and in larger cities will often be described as a financial district. Geographically, it often coincides wit ...

of Weatherford, a city in

Custer County, Oklahoma Custer County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 28,513. Its county seat is Arapaho. The county was named in honor of General George Armstrong Custer. Custer County comprises the Wea ...

. Named after NASA astronaut and Weatherford native Thomas P. Stafford, it is included in the

National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems The National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS) is an inventory of U.S. aviation infrastructure assets. With the Airport and Airway Improvement Act of September 3, 1982, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was required to develop a ...

for 2011–2015, which categorized it as a ''

general aviation General aviation (GA) is defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as all civil aviation aircraft operations except for commercial air transport or aerial work, which is defined as specialized aviation services for other ...

'' facility. Although many U.S. airports use the same three-letter

location identifier A location identifier is a symbolic representation for the name and the location of an airport, navigation aid, or weather station, and is used for staffed air traffic control facilities in air traffic control, telecommunications, computer program ...

for the FAA and

IATA The International Air Transport Association (IATA ) is an airline trade association founded in 1945. IATA has been described as a cartel since, in addition to setting technical standards for airlines, IATA also organized tariff conferences tha ...

, this airport is assigned OJA by the FAA but has no designation from the IATA. The Stafford Air & Space Museum, which is also named for Thomas P. Stafford, is located at the airport, and exhibits the Gemini 6A space capsule flown by Stafford and

Wally Schirra Walter Marty Schirra Jr. ( ; March 12, 1923 – May 3, 2007) was an American naval aviator (United States), naval aviator, test pilot, and NASA astronaut. In 1959, he became one of the Mercury Seven, original seven astronauts chosen for Pro ...

in 1965 and the spacesuit Stafford wore during his 1969

Apollo 10 Apollo 10 (May 18–26, 1969) was the fourth human spaceflight in the United States' Apollo program and the second to orbit the Moon. NASA, the mission's operator, described it as a "dress rehearsal" for the first Moon landing (Apollo 11, two ...

Moon mission.

Facilities and aircraft

Thomas P. Stafford Airport covers an area of 167

acre The acre ( ) is a Unit of measurement, unit of land area used in the Imperial units, British imperial and the United States customary units#Area, United States customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one Chain (unit), ch ...

s (68 ha) at an

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''location'' is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational equipotenti ...

of 1,605 feet (489 m) above

mean sea level A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...

. It has one

runway In aviation, a runway is an elongated, rectangular surface designed for the landing and takeoff of an aircraft. Runways may be a human-made surface (often asphalt concrete, asphalt, concrete, or a mixture of both) or a natural surface (sod, ...

designated 17/35 with a

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...

surface measuring 5,100 by 75 feet (1,554 x 23 m). The runway previously had an

asphalt Asphalt most often refers to: * Bitumen, also known as "liquid asphalt cement" or simply "asphalt", a viscous form of petroleum mainly used as a binder in asphalt concrete * Asphalt concrete, a mixture of bitumen with coarse and fine aggregates, u ...

surface measuring 4,400 by 75 feet (1,341 x 23 m). For the 12-month period ending June 13, 2018, the airport had 8,000 aircraft operations, 98%

, and 2% military, an average of 22 per day. At that time there were 30 aircraft based at this airport: 19 single-

engine An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power ge ...

, 6 multi-engine, 4 jet, and 1

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which Lift (force), lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning Helicopter rotor, rotors. This allows the helicopter to VTOL, take off and land vertically, to hover (helicopter), hover, and ...

References

External links

Thomas P. Stafford Airport

Thomas P. Stafford Airport (OJA)
at Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission
Aerial image as of February 1995
from

USGS The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an government agency, agency of the United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geograp ...

The National Map ''The National Map'' is a Collaboration, collaborative effort of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and other federal, state, and local agencies to improve and deliver topographic information for the United States. The purpose of the eff ...

'' * {{US-airport-ga, OJA, - Airports in Oklahoma Buildings and structures in Custer County, Oklahoma Thomas P. Stafford

Facilities and aircraft

See also

References

External links