Pilots at home with backyard airport
`Fly-in’ community in Pleasant View includes hangar- sized garages
By STACY SMITH SEGOVIA The Leaf-Chronicle
PLEASANT VIEW – Private islands don’t sell as well as you might think, even to billionaires. People don’t go for the “trapped” feeling – having to use a boat to get anything you need, from groceries to a tank of gas to your own mail.
Fly-in communities, almost as exotic-sounding as private islands, have a decidedly practical advantage. Pilots can get in their cars and drive to work, to the store, anywhere they might wish, at any moment.
When the skies are clear and the winds gentle, they can almost as quickly jump in their airplanes and fly off to destinations farther afield. Last week, pilot Bob Kier used his airplane to make fast and fun work of Thanksgiving travel.
“I just came back from Raleigh-Durham. It was a two-hour flight there and three hours back,” says Kier, standing next to his RV-4, an airplane he built with his own two hands.
Kier’s neighbors, Belinda and Jerry Vanatta, both pilots, have a hangar holding three airplanes and two ultralights, one of them amphibious, able to take off and land from both air and water.
“The two ultralights I just bought to have something to play with,” Vanatta says. “I’ve had a lifelong desire to fly and build my own airplanes.”
The Kiers and Vanattas meet in each other’s custom-built hangars – Kier designed his to match his house – or talk about their latest plane trips over morning coffee.
Right here in Tennessee
Sounds glamorous, right?
But these pilots and their neighbors are not living in an exclusive, luxury neighborhood. John Travolta does not pull up alongside them in his Boeing 707B, or even his comparatively small Gulfstream jet.
Travolta’s fly-in neighborhood, Jumbolair Aviation Estates, has a $6 million runway, a ballroom, an inn and country club complete with horses for morning hunts on the 550-acre grounds. Travolta’s neighbors at Jumbolair, in Anthony, Fla., include a Hamptons socialite who flies a leased Lear jet and a retired racecar driver who owns a Russian MiG fighter plane.
The Kiers’ and Vanattas’ Weakley Field neighborhood is a bit more low-key, and it’s right in Clarksville’s back yard.
Give me a home
Dale Weakley purchased a chunk of land in Cheatham County, a few miles past the Montgomery County line, back in 1975. Over the years, a shovel full of dirt at a time, he sculpted an airstrip out of the land. When his sons needed to go to college, he divided the property into saleable lots surrounding the airstrip, and a fly-in community was born.
Surrounded by horse farms and gentle hills, Weakley Field is a 30-minute drive from Nashville, 20 minutes from Clarksville. For the pilots who live there, it is a Southern slice of heaven.
“To a pilot, it’s kind of like lakefront property,” Weakley says, pointing out how each five- to six-acre lot has direct, roll-your-plane-onto-the-runway access to the grass airstrip.
Including the home owned by Weakley and his longtime girlfriend, Bobbi Decious, Weakley Field now has four houses owned by pilots – the Vanattas, the Kiers and Peter Nesbit. Four more lots – and in this way Weakley Field is exclusive – are available to pilots only.
“They make better neighbors in an airport community,” Weakley says.
In addition to not complaining about airplane noise, pilot neighbors are good to have when you need someone to talk to about engines, carburetor trouble or a sticky landing gear. Pilots compare trip notes and debate which of the nation’s small airports is the friendliest – many airports even providing courtesy cars, free of charge, for visiting pilots to use.
Where airplanes roam
Weakley loves getting into his bright orange, four-passenger, 1947 Bellanca Cruisair with Decious for long plane rides, like their recent trek to Arizona.
“How else can you fly to the Grand Canyon at 500 to 1,000 feet above the ground, with a view into everyone’s back yard along the way?” he says.
On a small scale, right here in Tennessee, a handful of pilots are living out their dreams, able to fly whenever the weather turns in their favor, without a long trip to a rented hangar to intervene. It’s something they have hoped for for decades.
“I remember back in grammar school, going to the library and checking out books on airplanes,” Jerry Vanatta says. “It’s something I just had to do.”
In addition to an adrenaline rush and an unparalleled view of the country, air travel also has the benefit of speed. Many home-built, single-engine prop planes cruise at speeds in the 190 to 200 mph range. Vanatta found that to be true on a visit to his sister in Lake of the Ozarks. What would have been an 11-hour drive took two hours in his handcrafted RV-9.
“It’s pretty neat to be able to pull out your airplane like you would your car, and fly anywhere you want to,” he says. “It’s a unique lifestyle.”
Stacy Smith Segovia is a features writer for The Leaf-Chronicle. She can be reached at 245-0237 or by e-mail atstacysegovia@theleafchronicle.com.
For more
Call Dale Weakley at (615) 746-5236, or send an e-mail to bell74466@charter.net.
Photo captions:
Dale Weakley checks the oil in his 1947 Bellanca Cruisair in front of his hanger. Weakley is developing a fly-in community around his landing strip. Robert Smith/The Leaf-Chronicle
Dale Weakley flies over his landing strip in his 1947 Bellanca Cruisair in this photo taken by Bobbi Decious from a bucket truck. Shown in the upper left are Jerry and Belinda Vanatta’s hangar and house, then Weakley and Decious’ hangar and house. Bobbi Decious/contributed photo