New Hampshire Rural Airports

A Report on General and Commercial Aviation in New Hampshire
PRS Briefs
PRS Policy Brief 1112-18
Monday, June 4, 2012
Stephen
Prager
'14
Andres
Ramirez
'14
prs_brief_1112-18.pdf

The majority of New Hampshire’s 143 airports are small, unpaved, private facilities. However, this report focuses primarily on the state’s twenty-four public access airports, which together comprise most of the state’s aviation activity. The quality of these twenty- four airports differs enormously, with facilities across the state ranging from helipads and two-mile long paved runways to tiny landing strips on grass, water, and ice. The funding sources these airports utilize are similarly diverse and in many cases insufficient, creating general inefficiency within the state’s aviation structure. In order to examine the issues these airports currently face more thoroughly, our team called 11 of the public access airports in New Hampshire and interviewed their staff to find out more about their current sources of funding and their greatest needs. We concluded that New Hampshire airports, most of which are tiny and face many infrastructure problems that they currently have a limited ability to address, should organize their existing funding sources more effectively as well as seek innovative new opportunities for acquiring more funds.