Albert Whitted Airport’s main runway begins just across First Street S from USFSP and extends northeast for 3,677 feet. Under consideration is a proposal to extend the runway eastward into Tampa Bay. That might move the takeoff and landing points on the runway to the east and ease the height restrictions on university buildings,
according to city officials.
Airport cramps university’s plans to grow.
For decades, the two institutions along the St. Petersburg waterfront have eyed each other warily, like neighbors fussing over the height of a hedge.
Albert Whitted Airport came first. Built in 1929 atop sand that was dredged up from the bay bottom to create the Port of St. Petersburg, the airport has endured – and expanded – despite repeated attempts to shut it down or close its main runway.
USFSP got to the neighborhood much later. Founded in 1965 on a finger of land that juts out into Bayboro Harbor, the university began to expand in the late 1970s on land that lies beneath the airport’s main flight path. That limits the height of campus buildings.
Now, with the university poised to begin a substantial expansion, the airport becomes an even bigger issue.
“Its presence affects the campus buildings,” said James Anthony Schnur, a historian and special collections librarian at the university’s Nelson Poynter Memorial Library. “They can never be replaced with higher buildings” if the airport’s main runway remains open.
The man who manages the city-owned airport has a different take, however.
On the City Council’s Nov. 12 agenda is a proposal to accept a $40,000 grant from the state Department of Transportation. If the council agrees and provides $10,000 more, the money would finance a feasibility study on extending the main runway, which runs northeast-southwest.
A longer runway would mean the airport could accommodate larger planes, said airport manager Richard Lesniak, but it would also give USFSP “a chance for vertical development opportunities.”
It would “benefit not just aviation but the community surrounding the airport,” Lesniak said. “This can help protect the new Pier (Park), extend the campus and add economic development (downtown). It is a win-win for everybody in the community.”
There are two runways at Albert Whitted.
The shorter, north-south runway is 2,864 feet long. The main runway is 3,677 feet. Since it begins just across First Street S from the university, the runway would have to be extended to the east, over the water of Tampa Bay.
That would require public hearings, environmental studies, permits from state and federal agencies, and the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration – a process that could take several years and prompt new objections from opponents of the airport.
City Council member Karl Nurse among the skeptics.
When the council discussed extending the runway in late 2014, Nurse said the complications and cost made the proposal “a non-starter with me,” according to the Tampa Tribune.
“I don’t think it’s even practical to spend too much energy thinking about this,” he said then.
“I was rather deeply involved in Albert Whitted Airport issues before I became a member of the City Council (in 2008),” Nurse said last week in an email to the Crow’s Nest. “My understanding remains that the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers is very reluctant to grant any permits that disturb the natural bottom (of the bay).”
To rebuild the nearby Pier, Nurse said, “the city has been in discussions with the Army Corps for more than a year.” And the Pier Park project “will not expand the footprint (of the building and its base) over water.”
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For a decade, a Goodyear blimp was based at Albert Whitted. In this photo,
taken in about 1930, the blimp hovered over people fishing at the Million Dollar Pier, precursor to the inverted pyramid Pier that is being demolished.
St. Petersburg’s downtown waterfront has been a hub of aviation activity for a hundred years.
In 1914, a Benoist “airboat” based there began America’s first scheduled commercial flight service with twice-daily flights to Tampa. The flights ended several months later when the novelty wore off.
In 1928, the City Council authorized the construction of an airport atop sand that had been pumped from the bottom of the bay. It was named in honor of Albert Whitted, a city native and aviation pioneer who died in a plane crash near Pensacola five years earlier.
When the tiny airport opened in 1929, it had only one runway. But it soon got a famous tenant. One of the blimps of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. was stationed there for a decade.
National Airlines, one of America’s first airline companies, was based at the airport for several years in the 1930s. A U.S. Coast Guard air station was built as an extension of the airport in 1935, and there was a small pilot training facility there during World War II.
It wasn’t long before Albert Whitted began drawing complaints and critics. For decades, the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) has mounted editorial campaigns against the airport. The facility is a danger and nuisance, the Times contends, and the prime waterfront land – now 110 acres – is better suited for public use.
In the 1940s, a group of property owners south of the airport took the city to court over the airport, branding it a nuisance and menace. But in 1947 the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city.
What is now USF St. Petersburg first opened for classes in 1965, but it wasn’t until the campus began to expand in the late 1970s that proximity to the airport became an issue.
Under city codes, state law and rules of the Federal Aviation Administration, buildings that lie underneath or near an airport’s flight patterns can’t exceed certain heights.
That meant the first new buildings in the early 1980s – now known as Davis, Bayboro and Coquina halls – could have only two stories.
Before Coquina Hall opened in 1984, some campus wags even took note of its location beneath the airport’s flight path. They suggested that it be named “Lookout Manor,” “Touchdown Hall” or “Kismet,” according to Schnur, the university historian.
James Grant, the university’s construction project manager, said campus buildings “must be lower than the heights” shown on a city map that reflects FAA regulations. “As the distance from the (main) runway alignment is increased, the allowable height of the buildings can increase,” he said.
For example, the Science and Technology building is two stories high and Residence Hall One, which is two blocks north and farther from the flight path, is seven stories. The Kate Tiedemann College of Business building, under construction on the block bounded by Third and Fourth streets S and Seventh and Eighth avenues, will have four stories.
In recent years, some university officials have joined the Times and some officials at City Hall, Bayfront Health St. Petersburg and All Children’s Hospital in urging closure of the airport or at least its main runway.
In the early 1980s, there was talk of closing the airport and splitting the land between USFSP and a new convention center. In 2002, then-Mayor Rick Baker proposed closing the main runway, selling 28.5 acres for private development, and extending the north-south runway by 736 feet.
But in 2003, St. Petersburg voters resoundingly defeated a proposal to close the airport and divide the valuable waterfront land between a park and an urban, mixed-use community. In response, Baker abandoned his plan and the City Council authorized significant improvements to the airport, including a new terminal building and restaurant and a new control tower.
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Airport officials and people who use the airport say it has a good safety record. But three times in 2014 there were plane crashes.
In one, the pilot of a banner-towing plane died when he crashed into the water south of the airport moments after takeoff.
In another, a small plane approaching the airport from the north barely missed hitting high-rise condo towers before crashing into Vinoy Park less than a mile north of the airport. Two of the four occupants were seriously injured, but St. Petersburg police spokeswoman Yolanda Fernandez said it could have been much worse.
“This is a park that’s used by many people every day,” she told the Tribune. “We have bikers and walkers and families out here, and the fact that it (the plane) was able to land, the four people survived and it did not injure anybody on the ground is really remarkable.”
Two years earlier, one man died and another was injured when their single-engine plane nose-dived into the main runway shortly after taking off.
The plane came to rest about 100 feet from the fence at the west end of the runway, just across the street from USFSP, according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
About 50 percent of the takeoffs and landings at Albert Whitted use the main runway, according to Lesniak, the airport manager. The preferred takeoff pattern is to the northeast, over water, but winds and other factors sometimes dictate a takeoff to the southwest, over USFSP.
When planes come in for landings over the university, they are 150 to 200 feet overhead, said Pete Flynn, manager of St. Pete Air, the airport’s flight school. “If you see them from the ground, they look closer,” he said.
It was the airport’s safety record that prompted City Council discussion in late 2014 that eventually led to talk of extending the main runway to accommodate bigger jets.
In a recent memo to the council, Clay Smith, director of the city’s Downtown Enterprise Facilities Department, said that extending the 3,677-foot-long runway by 1,300 feet to the east would mean the airport could accommodate more small and medium-size corporate planes.
That would generate higher revenue for the airport and the aircraft-support businesses based there, he wrote, and downtown St. Petersburg “would be more appealing as a place to locate/relocate major corporations” since having an airport and company planes within blocks of a company headquarters “is a real benefit and convenience.”
Extension of the runway also “could provide benefits beyond just aeronautical and economic,” Smith wrote. A longer runway would “act as an additional break wall,” providing more storm protection for the new Pier Park and boat channel for Demens Landing.
Extending the main runway would be a “win-win” for the airport, downtown development and the university, says airport manager Richard Lesniak.
In addition, he wrote, “it may be possible” to move the takeoff and landing points on the main runway farther east, “which would shift the aircraft flight path to higher altitudes over the properties to the immediate west of the airport, such as USF St. Petersburg.”
Dickson, the university’s director of facilities services, said the proposal would give the campus “more flexibility on building heights.”
However, it wouldn’t be feasible to add stories to existing buildings, he said. “The buildings were designed for two stories, and to add more floors, we would have to change the building superstructure, which is doubtful.
“It is much cheaper to build additional buildings.”
Information from the Tampa Tribune, Tampa Bay Times and “St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream: 1888-1950” by Raymond Arsenault was used in this report.
