Wainwright Airport is 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 in Wainwright, a city in the North Slope Borough of the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its so ...

Alaska Alaska ( ) is a non-contiguous U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. Part of the Western United States region, it is one of the two non-contiguous U.S. states, alongside Hawaii. Alaska is also considered to be the north ...

. The airport is owned by the North Slope Borough. As per

Federal Aviation Administration The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is a Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government agency within the United States Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Transportation that regulates civil aviation in t ...

records, the airport had 3,547 passenger boardings (enplanements) in

calendar year A calendar year begins on the New Year's Day of the given calendar system and ends on the day before the following New Year's Day, and thus consists of a whole number of days. The Gregorian calendar year, which is in use as civil calendar in ...

2008, 3,770 enplanements in 2009, and 4,129 in 2010. 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 ''non-primary commercial service'' airport (between 2,500 and 10,000 enplanements per year). 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 AWI by the FAA and AIN by the IATA. The airport's

ICAO The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO ) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international sch ...

identifier is PAWI.

History

The airport was built in 1957 to support the

Distant Early Warning Line The Distant Early Warning Line, also known as the DEW Line or Early Warning Line, was a system of radar stations in the northern Arctic region of Canada, with additional stations along the north coast and Aleutian Islands of Alaska (see List o ...

Radar station at Wainwright (LIZ-3). The station was logistically supported by the 711th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, which was based at Cape Lisburne Air Force Station, although civilian contract workers operated Point Lay. The radar station was upgraded in the late 1980s with new radars and in 1989 was re-designated part of the North Warning System (NWS) as a Long Range Radar Site, A-16. The DEW Line
/ref> The LRR site was inactivated in 2007 due to soil erosion and budget concerns. The airport remains open to support the small settlement under the control of the

Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center The Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center, formerly the 611th Air Support Group, is a United States Air Force unit. It is assigned to the Eleventh Air Force, stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska. The center is responsible ...

based at

Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson is a United States military facility in Anchorage, Alaska. It is a joint base formed from the United States Air Force's Elmendorf Air Force Base and the United States Army's Fort Richardson, which were merged ...

Facilities and aircraft

Wainwright Airport resides at

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 45 feet (14 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 a

gravel Gravel () is a loose aggregation of rock fragments. Gravel occurs naturally on Earth as a result of sedimentation, sedimentary and erosion, erosive geological processes; it is also produced in large quantities commercially as crushed stone. Gr ...

surface measuring 4,494 by 110 feet (1,370 x 34 m). For the 12-month period ending January 1, 2006, the airport had 1,100 aircraft operations, an average of 91 per month: 73%

air taxi An air taxi is a small commercial aircraft that makes short flights on demand. History The concept of air taxis existed as early as the 1910s. This concept goes back as early as 1917 with Glenn Curtiss’ prototype, the auto-plane. Furthermor ...

and 27%

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 ...

Airlines and destinations

Before its bankruptcy and cessation of all operations, Ravn Alaska served the airport from multiple locations.

Statistics

References

External links