Joshua Sanford Field was a 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 one

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 ...

(2 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 Hillsboro, a city in

Vernon County, Wisconsin Vernon County is a county in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census, the population was 30,714. Its county seat is Viroqua. History Vernon County was renamed from Bad Ax County on March 22, 1862. Bad Ax County had been created o ...

, United States. It was owned by the City of Hillsboro. The airport closed sometime in the fall of 2016, due to it being unsafe to operate from due to the nearby

Land O'Lakes Land O'Lakes, Inc. is an American member-owned agricultural cooperative based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb of Arden Hills, Minnesota, United States, focusing on the dairy industry. The cooperative has 1,959 direct producer-members, 751 ...

butter plant being expanded right off the runway threshold. The airport was no longer listed in the November 10, 2016 publication of the FAA Airport/Facility Directory. 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 facility was assigned HBW by the FAA but had no designation from the IATA.

Facilities and aircraft

Joshua Sanford Field covers an area of 16

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 (6 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 938 feet (286 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 5/23 with 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 3,070 by 46 feet (936 x 14 m). For the 12-month period ending June 9, 2015, the airport had 1,405 aircraft operations, an average of 117 per month: roughly 99%

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 ...

and >1%

military A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. Militaries are typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with their members identifiable by a d ...

. In September 2016, there were 7 aircraft based at this airport: All 7 single engine.

Closing of the airport

The airport was closed because of the expansion of the

butter plant, which is next to the airport. There were talks about transforming it into private members only airport. The airport would then shorten the runway to accommodate for the nearby obstacles. This plan failed when the FAA refused to allow the runway to be shortened.

References

{{Aviation in Wisconsin Defunct airports in the United States Airports in Wisconsin Vernon County, Wisconsin Buildings and structures in Vernon County, Wisconsin 2016 disestablishments in Wisconsin