RAF announces airstrip network in Tennessee

Fly Rocky Top is built around a base camp and outpost concept. Rockwood Municipal Airport anchors the network and has a 2,400-foot turf landing area. From there, pilots can fly to surrounding strips for hiking, fishing, hunting, or paddling, and come back to Rockwood to camp.

“Seventy-five percent of people in the U.S. live within 700 miles of Rockwood, Tennessee, and 50 percent within 500 miles, so within a half-day flight in a Cub, half the population in the United States can get to Fly Rocky Top,” said Jeff Smith, the RAF team lead overseeing Fly Rocky Top. “So, there’s a very pragmatic reason why the RAF is involved... it’s where people live.”

The RAF says that Fly Rocky Top is unique in that the airstrips are a combination of both public lands and privately owned property, whose owners want to welcome the flying public.

Fly Rocky Top also adds the southeastern United States to a growing collection of airstrip networks around the country and represents the most significant achievement yet in the RAF’s Expanding the Map initiative, which aims to open, improve, and restore access to airstrips.

RAF President Bill McGlynn said the organization plans many more of these announcements over the next 18 months.

“Every month, we’re going to be announcing more and more of these airstrips,” said McGlynn.

While most pilots think of backcountry flying as being predominantly available in the western United States and Alaska, McGlynn says to expect announcements in additional states such as Maine, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, and Texas. McGlynn says Texas “has been one of the hardest states for us,” citing the state’s limited public land.