SPRUCE CREEK, Florida -- While rolling down a broad street in a small community in central Florida, Paul Miller saw a friend walking on the sidewalk and pulled over to chat. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day. But what makes this instance unique is Miller was in a Lancair IV, a sleek home-built single-engine plane. In this community, it happens all the time.
Welcome to Spruce Creek.
Spruce Creek is the world's largest fly-in community, which also are called airparks. Though airparks can be as informal as a farm with a grass strip, the big ones often are a curious mix of airport and suburban subdivision where homes have hangars and roads double as taxiways. They're the kind of places where a traffic jam might include golf carts, cars and airplanes, and there are more of them than you think.
Dave Sclair, runs Living With Your Plane, a comprehensive website about airparks. He says there are about 600 listed on his site, and most of them are in the United States and Canada. And the list is growing.
"The trend has been toward more residential airparks over the last decade," he said in an e-mail. Such places are among the few places in the world where most aspects of daily life are suffused with aviation.
Spruce Creek's lone restaurant and bar, the Downwind Café, sits at the intersection of two major taxiways and it's filled with kitschy aviation memorabilia. The drone of propellers is constant in the background. Residents speak in baffling shorthand about 152s, 430s, Mode C, Class D, RDU, JAX, squawking, crabbing and descending from two-two-oh. It's the kind of place where taxiing biplanes elicit barely a glance but conversations pause as people turn to watch a Cessna landing, which is then critiqued. And it seems everyone knows someone who has met Chuck Yeager or Bob Hoover, among the high priests of piloting.
The residents of Spruce Creek are not an especially diverse lot. Flying is an expensive hobby, and the people who live in town tend to earn hefty paychecks. That's true of most airparks.
"Our survey a few years ago indicated the average residential airpark resident was upper middle ages -- 45 to 65 years old," Sclair said. "Usually with kids gone or very shortly to leave, usually well-established in a profession or career."
Some residents of Spruce Creek are professional pilots. Others are doctors, lawyers and land speculators, and the rumor is there's a Nobel laureate in town. And these people are, without exception, nuts about aviation. A degree of fanaticism is necessary to eat, sleep and breathe aviation in the Spruce Creek manner, and residents are unabashedly enthusiastic.
"There’s nothing like Spruce Creek," says Spencer Lane, a longtime resident and pilot. "It’s so much larger than any of the other fly-in communities that exist."
Some are a little more nuts about aviation than others. In one incident that has become a part of Spruce Creek folklore, a resident buzzed the small runway in his airline's brand-new Boeing 777. John Travolta, who is to aviation as Jay Leno is to cars, kept a house here for a time before moving to Ocala, Florida, which has a runway long enough to handle his personal 707.
"The recession impact has been mixed," Sclair wrote, "I've spoken with some developers who have seen continued sales and others that say the bottom has fallen out. I suspect that this is similar to home sales in other type communities."
Having so many true enthusiasts around brings a stunning diversity of aircraft, from ubiquitous Cessnas and Pipers to home-built experimentals to more exotic hardware. There's at least one Russian MiG-15 fighter jet, several L-39 Albatros jet trainers from what used to be Czechoslovakia and an Eclipse 500 jet; a French Fouga Magister jet is parked near the runway. If you're looking for something a little more old-school, a half-open hangar door reveals a P-51 Mustang and there's a replica Fokker triplane next to the main taxiway.
Early Saturday morning, a group of people -- with rare exceptions they are men, all over 50 and many long retired -- gather beside the runway, greeting one another and cracking jokes. They have gathered to participate in Spruce Creek’s most venerated tradition, the Saturday Morning Gaggle. The Gaggle consists of several planes -- the number varies, but today there are at least a dozen -- divided into performance categories. They take off in groups of three and fly to one of the local airports for breakfast. It's something of a Sunday drive for the winged set, a variation of the classic $100 hamburger so well-known to recreational pilots. The breakfast conversation is, as usual, about aviation -- talking over recent crashes, design changes, composite materials and Boeing’s 787.
Despite the wide 4,000-foot runway that forms the heart of the gated community, just 440 of the 1,598 homes have an aircraft hangar. A general gearhead atmosphere pervades the neighborhood, and in addition to all the airplanes and golf cars, you'll see Lamborghinis, Corvettes, motorcycles of every description and even a Porsche GT2. Of course there's a golf course, and numerous small ponds that host all sorts of wildlife. The pilots fret constantly about the birds, which include vultures, egrets and eagles that can easily take down a small plane.
Like a small town, the people of Spruce Creek are tight-knit. Everyone seems to know everyone by name, address and FAA type rating. It doesn't draw the kinds of pilgrimages you get at the big AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or the Mojave Spaceport, but those who come tend to stay.
"Spruce Creek is unique, no question about that,” says one home-built Gaggle pilot over hash browns.
Photos: Zach Rosenberg/Wired.com
Pilots head off on a Saturday Morning Gaggle, a weekly event akin to the old Sunday drive.
