New York Stewart International Airport – colloquially known as Stewart International Airport, is a public/military airport in Orange County, New York, United States. It is in the southern Hudson Valley, west of Newburgh, south of Kingston, and southwest of Poughkeepsie, approximately north of Manhattan, New York City.
Stewart Airport is located within the towns of Newburgh and New Windsor."Newburgh town, Orange County, New York ." U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved on February 2, 2011."New Windsor town, Orange County, New York ." U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved on February 2, 2011. It is included in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems for 2017–2021, in which it is categorized as a non-hub primary commercial service facility.
Developed in the 1930s as a military base to allow cadets at the nearby United States Military Academy at West Point to learn aviation, it has grown into a significant passenger airport for the mid-Hudson region and continues as a military airfield, housing the 105th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard and Marine Aerial Refueler Transport Squadron 452 (VMGR-452) of the United States Marine Corps Reserve. The airport was designated as an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle.
After its closure as a U.S. Air Force base in the 1970s, an ambitious plan by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to expand and develop the airport led to a protracted struggle with local landowners that led to reforms in the state's eminent domain laws but no actual development of the land acquired. In 1981 the 52 American hostages held in Iran made their return to American soil at Stewart.
In 2000 the airport became the first U.S. commercial airport privatized when United Kingdom-based National Express was awarded a 99-year lease on the airport. National Express sold the rights to the airport seven years later; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey board voted to acquire the remaining 93 years of the lease and later awarded AFCO AvPorts the contract to operate the facility. The Port Authority rebranded the airport as New York Stewart International Airport in 2018 to emphasize its proximity to New York City.
History
Stewart Dairy Farm In 1930, Thomas "Archie" Stewart, an early aviation enthusiast and descendant of prominent local dairy farmer Lachlan Stewart, convinced his uncle Samuel Stewart to donate "Stoney Lonesome", split between the towns of Newburgh and New Windsor, to the nearby city of Newburgh for use as an airport.Stewart International Airport – A Journey in Flight; retrieved from stewartinternationalairport.com January 27, 2007. With the city strapped for cash due to the Depression, however, it was unable to develop it in any way.
Stewart Airfield In 1934, Douglas MacArthur, then superintendent of the United States Military Academy, proposed flight training for cadets at the airport. The city sold the land to the military academy for one dollar. A small dirt airstrip was cleared and graded. One of the gates at USMA has been known as Stoney Lonesome Gate ever since.
During World War II, many barracks and other buildings, which still stand, were built on the base. In January 2008, the Town of New Windsor received a $2.5 million grant from the state to demolish 30–40 buildings as part of the redevelopment of the former base. First Columbia, the developer, said that 20–30 of the buildings could be retained and reused.
Stewart Air Force / Air National Guard Base
After the creation of the United States Air Force following World War II, the army airfield was converted to an air force base while still being used for training of cadets at West Point. Stewart became the home of Headquarters 1st Region Army Air Defense Command in 1966. It remained so until the deactivation of the Nike Hercules system at the end of 1974. The air force base was deactivated in 1970 and it officially remained unoccupied by the Air Force until 1983, when the 105th Airlift Wing (105 AW) and the 213th Engineer Installation Squadron (213 EIS) of the New York Air National Guard took up quarters. The Air National Guard unit has flown support missions not only for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also for humanitarian relief efforts.
This area of the airport, now called Stewart Air National Guard Base, was home to the Air Force C-5 Galaxy aircraft before being replaced by the newer and smaller C-17 Globemaster III in 2011. Stewart ANGB also hosted VMGR-452, a Marine Corps Reserve squadron flying the KC-130J, until 2022.
Stewart International Airport
MTA expansion plan In the early 1970s, Governor Nelson Rockefeller's administration saw the potential for Stewart to support the metropolitan area. Its long runway made it particularly attractive for intercontinental service via supersonic transport (SST), then under development in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was the first government body to try to convert it into the New York metropolitan area's fourth major airport. It tripled the airport's territory, extending its land well beyond its previous western boundary at Drury Lane, a two-lane rural road. The state government used its eminent domain powers to take 7,500 acres (30 km) for terminals, runways and a buffer zone expanding the airport from Newburgh into neighboring towns of Montgomery and a small portion of Hamptonburgh. The land was bounded by I-84 to the north, Route 207 along the south and roughly by Rock Tavern and Maybrook in the west.
Local opposition Area residents who were already fighting a large power plant proposal at nearby Storm King Mountain fiercely fought the expansion. They took the state to court, ultimately forcing the legislature to write and pass the New York State Eminent Domain Procedure Act, a sweeping overhaul of its existing law on the subject. In order to get the last holdouts off their land, state officials pledged that outside the proposed airport facilities, none of the land taken would ever be redeveloped, a promise that was to haunt them years later.
By the time the land was finally available, the 1973 oil crisis and the attendant increase in the price of jet fuel had forced airlines to cut back, and some of the airport's original backers began arguing it was no longer economically viable. US SST development was canceled in 1971, undercutting another argument for the project. Malcolm Wilson, Rockefeller's successor, put the project on hold; and his successor, Hugh Carey, ended it permanently in 1976.
New York State Department of Transportation ownership In early 1981, the 52 U.S. hostages held at the former U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, returned to American soil at Stewart International following two weeks at U.S. bases in Germany and 444 days of captivity, ending the Iran hostage crisis. The route they took from Stewart International to West Point is marked today as "Freedom Road."
The next year the state transferred control from MTA to its own Department of Transportation (NYSDOT), with a mandate to improve and develop the airport. Three years later W.R. Grace became the first private tenant when it built a corporate jet hangar, and the following year an industrial park was built nearby. Finally, in 1990, commercial airline service began with American Airlines offering service with three daily round trips to both Chicago and Raleigh/Durham.
Continuing development issues As the 1980s wore on, veterans of earlier battles over Stewart returned to start new ones. NYSDOT and the Stewart Airport Commission found themselves overseeing not only the airport but the acres of now-vacant land the state had acquired a decade before. After turning over management of most of the property to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which was better equipped for the task, it still faced the problem of what to do with the land.
The region's needs had changed. With IBM and other large industrial concerns cutting workers and closing plants, and people leaving, a large swath of buildable land with few environmental problems was seen by many in the local business community as a goose's golden egg. It couldn't be a sprawling airport, but it could be something else, they thought.
But those people who remained or moved up from more crowded areas to the south had begun to enjoy the outdoor recreation possibilities the lands, referred to variously as the Stewart Properties or the buffer, offered. Mountain bikers, horses, dirt bikers, ATVers, and hikers had all begun to explore and create trails, and DEC's management opened up the area as a popular spot for local hunters and anglers. DEC had also released captured beavers on the properties, who built dams and created new wetlands.
One local hunter, Ben Kissam, formed the Stewart Park and Reserve Coalition (SPARC) in 1987 to oppose efforts to develop the lands. They and other environmentalists and conservationists argued that the whole area would be better off left as a park, pointing to the growing diversity of species on the lands and the state's original promise not to redevelop the area. They were joined, too, by some area residents who said that the existing air traffic, particularly the military C-5s, was noisy enough as it was.
Also generating a lot of noise was the continuing debate in Orange County about what to do with the land, with participants' choice of words ("buffer" vs. "properties") suggesting where they stood. Interpretations differed as to just how much of the land was really meant to serve as a buffer.
The administration of Mario Cuomo tried several times to come up with a plan that would balance these interests, but failed. As one of its last acts, it started a renovation of the passenger terminal using a federal grant.
SWF had occasionally had scheduled air-taxi service, but in April 1990 American Airlines arrived with three Boeing 727-200 nonstops a day to Chicago and three more to its new hub in Raleigh–Durham. Nonstop flights to Dallas Fort/Worth were later added as well. Jet nonstops to Atlanta (Delta) and Pittsburgh (USAir) appeared in the next couple of years; Delta later added Cincinnati, and USAir tried Baltimore.
Privatization In 1994, George Pataki campaigned on improving efficiencies by privatizing money-losing state projects. Ronald Lauder, who had written a book about European successes in privatizations, suggested Stewart be privatized. Pataki created the New York State Council on Privatization and appointed Lauder its chair.
Federal law at the time required that all airports providing passenger service had to be owned by some public entity. With much support from the New York delegation, the United States Congress eventually passed legislation allowing five airports to be privatized as a pilot program, providing certain conditions such as approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and by the carriers representing at least two-thirds of the airport's flights.
In 1997, the state formally began, through the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the process of soliciting bids for a 99-year lease on the airport and, potentially, the adjacent undeveloped lands as well, whatever bidders wanted. Efforts by SPARC, now headed by Kissam's widow Sandra, and other citizen activists to find out about who might be bidding and what they planned to do with Stewart were blocked by the state's invocation of a clause in its State Finance Law prohibiting disclosure of competitive bids prior to the award of the contract, an interpretation that survived a court challenge.