Broken Arrow may study feasibility of building a municipal airport

By John Dobberstein, Editor

At his State of the City speech next week, Broken Arrow City Manager Michael Spurgeon plans to announce he will request a feasibility study for potential construction of a municipal regional airport in the city.

Spurgeon didn’t go into many specific details about the potential study, but said the city gets contacted “all the time” by corporate headquarters in Broken Arrow and elsewhere about the idea, and local pilots have also asked about it.

“I think we’ve reached a point where we need to have a feasibility study done to determine what would be necessary, and what the cost would be,” Spurgeon told the Broken Arrow City Council Tuesday.

“We’re very fortunate to have folks in the engineering and construction department that have experience in that area. An airport can also be a major economic development driver.”

City councilors did not comment on Spurgeon’s announcement Tuesday as they adjourned their meeting.

Although Broken Arrow is the fourth largest city in Oklahoma, it is not very close to the two established airports in Tulsa. The city is nearly 15 miles away from Tulsa-Riverside Airport — which is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the U.S. — and 12 miles from Tulsa International Airport, which is seeing steady increases in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

Broken Arrow is also 102 miles from Northwest Arkansas National Airport and 126 miles from Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.

How much it would cost to build a municipal airport would depend on the scale of the terminal, runway and taxiways, hangars and parking, along with land acquisition.

How much it would cost to build a municipal airport would depend on the scale of the terminal, runway and taxiways, hangars and parking, along with land acquisition. Some estimates say a small regional airport could cost $100 million to $500 million to build, although estimates can vary significantly from one project to another.

The Oklahoma Department of Aerospace and Aeronautics recently rolled out a 5-year airport construction plan that will send over $300 million to airports across the state, with the biggest chunk to Will Rogers World Airport.

Decades ago, Broken Arrow did have an airport of sorts near the intersection of Omaha Street and S. 190^th East Avenue. It was originally known as Funk Airfield, then Broken Arrow Airport, Country Club Airport and finally Cotton Field when the property was owned by Doyle Cotton.

According to a website that carries the history of old and abandoned airfields, Funk Airfield was a small general aviation airport evidently established between 1960 and 1965. Funk Airfield was renamed Broken Arrow Airport between 1965 and 1967, sporting a 2,500-foot unpaved runway and a single building.

The airport was evidently renamed again to Country Club Airport between 1967 and 1973. In 1973 the air strip was renamed as Cotton Field and, at that time, had a partially paved runway and parallel taxiway and a small hangar.

Sometime between 1978 and 1988, Cotton Field was changed from a public-use airport to a private airport.

A contributor to the website, Mike Huffman, said that in the late 1970s and early 1980s Doyle Cotton, an oilman, maintained a collection of antique airplanes in the hangar at the airport.

Another contributor, Bill Pinney, said he was based at TUL in the early to mid-1980s, flying a Lear 35A for Doyle Cotton. “The main hangar was full of antiques, which we could fly as much as we wanted,” he said.