STUART, Fla. — Witham Field is the home of the Stuart Air Show. It was founded more than a hundred years ago with the first, physical airport built in 1928. The Stuart Air Show is the biggest economic engine in the entire county.
“Growing up I always tinkered around airports,” Interim Airport Manager Andrew McBean said.
McBean took WPTV on a lap around Witham Field.
“This tower here used to be the old Grumman tower,” he said.
Originally called MacArthur Field, it was later renamed in honor of Paul Witham, a Stuart man who was killed in action in 1942. The airport served as a military training field during World War II. Today, it has an economic impact of $1.3 billion.
“$1.3 billion comes from the on airport spending, off airport spending plus employment that comes from the airport,” Bean said.
About 6,800 jobs are connected to the airport and some 55 businesses are linked here.
The airport is surrounded by neighborhoods, and has done its best to be a good neighbor, implementing a voluntary noise curfew between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.
The U.S. Customs Facility at Martin County/Whitham Field was opened in 2019, and a new administration building is currently taking shape. The bottom floor will serve as a backup emergency operations center for the county.
Now, as opposed to the Vero Beach airport, which has had a successful start with Breeze Airways, and the St. Lucie Count international Airport, which has requested to start up commercial service, you will not be able to get on a commercial plane in Stuart anytime soon.
“We will never adopt commercial service here at Martin County Airport,” Bean said. “It’s not something the community wants, the community strongly opposes that and it would not work well with the business community we currently have at the Martin County Airport.”
However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be growth here. A master plan was recently unveiled for how the airport will change over the next few decades. The answer— not much.
“So, there’s no expansions, there’s no changing of the properties, no acquiring other boundaries to expand the airport,” Bean said. “We’re just looking for the best possible use for what we currently have here at the airport.”
There is still a plan to build new hangars and rebuild the emergency safety beds at the end of the runways, but the plan is to stay grounded in what it does best-- serve as a general aviation airport for the foreseeable future.
A small airport doesn’t mean it isn’t a busy airport.
With two flight training schools, the airport has 135,000 to 140,000 operations annually, so over 10,000 takeoffs and landings each month.
