Hangars: The Hidden Bottleneck Slowing General Aviation's Return

ImpactAir: The Aviation Edge for Communities gives economic developers, airport executives/managers, elected officials, and industry stakeholders a source to explore emerging aviation topics affecting community development. 

Several years ago, I asked an economic development director a simple question: "How many companies are waiting for space at your industrial park?"

That kind of question is an economic development professional’s bread and butter, and he answered immediately.

Then I asked a second question: "How many aircraft owners are waiting for a hangar at your airport?"

He didn’t have an answer, because while that question has the potential to be just as critical to a community’s economic development opportunities, many communities continue to classify airports as luxury amenities instead of anchor economic development assets. 

Here’s the reality: At Triangle North Executive Airport outside Louisburg, North Carolina, director Bo Carson fields two or three calls a week from pilots looking for hangar space. He has 45 T-hangars, and when one opens up, the phone starts ringing nearly as soon as the previous tenant has vacated. Thirty miles away in Fuquay-Varina, the story repeats at Southern Wake Regional. Manager Mattea Williams describes a waitlist of people ready to buy an airplane and nowhere to put them. (WUNC News, July 2026.)

That last detail is the one worth sitting with: ready to buy an airplane, but with nowhere to put it. Not priced out. Not uninterested. Blocked by a lack of space.

This is the quiet failure point in general aviation's growth story, and it's largely invisible to the people who could fix it.  Economic developers, airport executives, and elected officials watch runway lengths, terminal upgrades, and headline-grabbing recruitment wins, while the thing actually capping growth sits at ground level. 

The scale of the problem isn't a rumor

According to AOPA's 2023 Airport Support Network survey, 71 percent of general aviation airports report a hangar shortage. Some industry reviews report facilities with multi-year waiting lists even higher. This isn't a handful of popular airports in growth corridors; this is the heart of general and corporate aviation. 

That pressure is building, not easing. The FAA's general aviation forecast anticipates that the active fleet will grow by more than 12 percent between 2026 and 2046. And turbine aircraft,  the segment most dependent on hangar space, is expanding even faster. A new federal tax provision allowing up to 100 percent depreciation on aircraft purchases is accelerating corporate jet demand. In July, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced nearly $1.8 billion in airport improvement grants, with hangar construction specifically named as an eligible priority. States are starting to notice too. Pennsylvania is considering aviation tax and fee changes to fund hangar projects.

The demand curve is pointing sharply up. The supply of covered aircraft storage is not.

Why this is an economic development problem, not just an airport problem

It's easy to file hangar shortages under "airport operations" and move on. That's a mistake, and the mechanism is worth spelling out plainly, because it runs through three distinct audiences in three distinct ways.

For airport executives, an empty waiting list is deferred revenue walking out the door. Unlike commercial airports, GA facilities don't have passenger fees to lean on. Hangar leases are often the single most reliable, controllable revenue stream a GA airport manager has. Every owner who takes their business to an airport down the road with open ramp space is revenue that airport will never see, plus the fuel sales, maintenance spend, and based-aircraft counts that come with it.

For economic developers, the stakes are bigger than any one airport's balance sheet. General aviation infrastructure feeds corporate aviation, MRO facilities, aerospace suppliers, and business travel.  Those are the kinds of site-selection factors that determine whether a company lands in your county or the next one over. A community that can't guarantee a corporate flight department a place to base its aircraft has quietly disqualified itself from consideration before the conversation even starts.

For elected officials, this is where the political calculus usually goes wrong. Hangars don't have the ribbon-cutting appeal of a new terminal or a splashy relocation announcement. They're unglamorous, and that makes them easy to defer, budget after budget, until the waiting list is long enough to make a reporter's story instead of a planning memo.

Download our whitepaper, impactAIR: Securing the Future of Local Airports, to learn how preparing for the future of air travel can hep communities with local airports position themselves for economic development success. 

What success looks like

The payoff for treating this as core infrastructure isn't theoretical. In Salina, KS, a former Air Force base converted into a regional airport and industrial center now generates more than $1.62 billion in economic activity and supports more than 12,376 jobs, representing 41 percent of the county's total economic output. Jobs there grew 77 percent in four years. DuPage Airport outside Chicago turned a $2 million annual loss into $1.5 billion in annual economic activity and 5,500 supported jobs, in part by treating airport land and capacity as an active development asset rather than a maintenance line item.

Contrast that with what happens when the political will lags the demand. In southeast Georgia, a patchwork of small airports — Statesboro-Bulloch, Claxton-Evans, and a long-proposed facility in Bryan County —  has spent years debating whether the region needs expanded GA capacity while demand has kept building around it. No single decision-maker failed; the system simply moved slower than the market. That gap is now the region's problem to solve retroactively, instead of a problem it had the opportunity to get ahead of.

Signal versus substance

There's a broader pattern worth naming here, because it shows up across community development generically, not just in aviation: generic place marketing. The slogans, the logos, the "come grow with us" campaigns, have consistently weak, hard-to-measure ROI. Concrete infrastructure investment does not. A hangar is a measurable, leasable, revenue-generating asset that a pilot, a corporate flight department, or a site-selection consultant can evaluate in about thirty seconds: is there room, or isn't there? It’s also something a community can point to that sets it apart from another community down the road, a point of differentiation that cuts through similar-sounding messages about workforce, quality of life, or available land. 

The ask

If your economic development strategy includes an airport at all, ask a blunt question: how long is the hangar waiting list, and does anyone on your team know the answer? If nobody does, that's the first sign this piece of infrastructure has been invisible in your planning for too long.

Changing that perspective will create opportunities that would not otherwise be possible. Because communities that treat hangar capacity as core economic development infrastructure will in all cases outcompete those who continue to misclassify and ignore their airport. 

In the next article, I will be exploring the effects of data center expansion on community airports. 

Golden Shovel Agency can help you position your airport for future success.  Schedule a meeting today to learn how you can leverage your airport to strengthen your community's future. 

Ron Kresha is an avid pilot and aviation strategist. He is a leading voice for airport strategy development and economic development. He frequently presents his research at aviation and economic development conferences. He is a founding member of Golden Shovel Agency.