For more than 50 years, the Grand Canyon National Park Airport in Tusayan has served as a hub for many who visit one of Arizona’s most popular tourist sites.

The Grand Canyon airport — owned and operated by the Arizona Department of Transportation — was the sixth-busiest Arizona airport in 2021, serving more than 75,000 passengers.

The current airport opened in 1965 and the terminal was dedicated on Oct. 20, 1967. In honor of the terminal’s 55th anniversary, we decided to take a look at the airport’s past, present and future.

The Grand Canyon National Park Airport is the gateway to one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World and while the Grand Canyon’s allure stems from its natural beauty, the airport does have modern, man-made amenities. A restroom renovation is nearly complete and other potential upgrades have been identified, too.

The staff at the airport is small in numbers – about 14 – but encompasses a variety of skills and expertise including administrative, maintenance staff and firefighters.

And no blog is complete with some “fun facts,” so here you go:  

• For the last 20 years, the airport has hosted an annual holiday party for first-grade to third-grade students to decorate a Christmas tree and meet Santa Claus.
• The airport supports the annual Toys for Tots with the Marines, an event that sees helicopters deliver food and toys to the Havasupai tribe.
• The airport has featured visits from political figures, including First Lady Jill Biden, who visited the airport in June 2022 while filming a National Geographic’s docuseries, “America’s National Parks.” In 2009, then-President Barack Obama and his family traveled to the airport on Air Force One.

What exactly are we looking at here?

No, we didn't catch any unidentified flying objects. Instead it's an extraordinary long-exposure photo of a pretty ordinary thing – jet airliners taking off out of Sky Harbor International Airport.

Why, you ask, are we sharing a photo from an airport? Shouldn't we be looking down at the highway?

Well, consider this a reminder that ADOT encompasses more than just building and maintaining state highways and freeways (though we spend a lot of time on that too!). As we've talked about in previous blogs, in 1974 the Arizona Highway Department was merged with the Aeronautics Department to create the Arizona Department of Transportation. To this day ADOT continues to play a role in airport development, the Motor Vehicle Divsion registers aircraft and ADOT operates the Grand Canyon National Park Airport. 

With all that in mind, feel free to fly away on this fantastic shot!

On this day in 1928, according to The Associated Press, the Grand Canyon’s first official airport was dedicated by its owner, Scenic Airways. That airport was the predecessor to the current airport in Tusayan that ADOT has operated since 1974. 

Scenic Airways was founded by J. Parker Van Zandt, and he fell in love with seeing the Grand Canyon from the air while delivering an airplane from Detroit to California while working for the Ford Motor Co. in 1927, according to The Arizona Republic. That article goes on to say that Van Zandt was back at the Grand Canyon soon after negotiating a deal with the Fred Harvey Co. to fly tourists over the canyon.

By the next year, pilots were taking off from dirt airstrips to ferry tourists over the mile-deep gorge, less than a decade after the Grand Canyon became a national park in 1919.

Today, Grand Canyon National Park Airport is Arizona's fourth-busiest airport in terms of passengers served. The airport hosts six air tour companies and has commercial flights coming in daily from three airlines based in the Las Vegas region. Together, the airport and its tour companies serve well over 300,000 passengers annually.

Scenic Airways eventually became Grand Canyon Airlines and is still in operation today doing charter flights and tours of the Grand Canyon.

For a more detailed look at the early years of aviation at the Grand Canyon, including visits by famous pilots of the day like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, check out this ADOT blog post.

When it comes to air tourism and travel, Arizona has been on the cutting edge of history.

On this day in 1927, Arizona became the first state in the nation to regulate and control commercial transportation of passengers and fuel, according to The Associated Press. That’s also the year that ADOT, then known as the Arizona State Highway Department, got its start.

Today, ADOT manages several functions associated with aviation:

• In 1963, the state Aeronautics Department was formed to handle the business end of airport development in Arizona. It merged with Arizona Highway Department in 1974 to create the Arizona Department of Transportation. You can read more about this chapter in this blog and learn more about ADOT's airport development role here.
• Since 1965, the state has owned and operated Grand Canyon National Park Airport in Tusayan, which is the fourth-busiest in the state in terms of passengers served. Read more in this blog.
• In the early 2000s, aeronautics functions were reorganized within ADOT. The aircraft registration unit was sent to the Motor Vehicle Division, the airport development group went to the Multimodal Planning Division and Grand Canyon National Park Airport was organized under the Administrative Services Division.

You may be surprised by how much ADOT handles in terms of transportation in every corner of the state. Aviation is one facet of that.

Recently, the staff at the Grand Canyon National Park Airport was going about their daily business when suddenly an alarm began to sound and the red emergency phone began to ring. There had been a crash on the west side of the runway as a 25-passenger aircraft was attempting to land!

Fortunately, there was no real emergency. This was all part of a simulated disaster drill that I got to take part in along with the rest of the staff of the Grand Canyon Airport and other local agencies.

While this triennial exercise is required by the Federal Aviation Administration, it gives the airport staff and firefighters a chance to put their skills to the test and evaluate where they could improve so they will be more prepared in the event of a real emergency.

I hung out in the Incident Command room along with Matt Smith, the airport manager, and Michael Cockrum, the airport operations manager, who were busily gathering information from the first responders at the site of the “crash.”

Folks from the Tusayan Fire District, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and Coconino County Emergency Management participated in the exercise alongside the airports firefighters. About 14 volunteers also came out to play as victims in the drill. Emergency responders practiced their search-and-rescue skills to find the victims and then practiced triaging and treating the victims.

These exercises wouldn’t be successful without the help of volunteers and first responders from other agencies. ADOT Emergency Manager Kevin Duby, who was also on-site as an evaluator, said meeting other first responders beforehand makes you a better team when a real emergency occurs.

The Grand Canyon Airport staff and other local agencies are better prepared for real emergencies thanks to exercises like these.

For more information on airport and the exercise, watch the video of the scenario put together by our video crew.

It’s been little more than a century since the Wright brothers flew the first flying machine just outside of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and modern air travel is almost unrecognizable from its humble roots. Today, ADOT's Aeronautics Group handles the business end of airport development in Arizona.

“The Aeronautics Department was set up in statutes in 1963,” former Aeronautics Group Manager Michael Klein said. “From 1963 to 1965, the Grand Canyon Airport was designed, built and open for business. Then the governor decided we needed a joint transportation agency.”

From that time until 1974, the Aeronautics Department acted in the capacity of Arizona’s aviation agency, Klein explained, and was solely responsible for air travel in Arizona. In July 1974, the governor merged the Aeronautics Department and the Arizona Highway Department, together making the Arizona Department of Transportation. From then until the early 2000s, the Aeronautics Division, as it was known then, took care of aircraft registrations and oversaw operations at Grand Canyon National Park Airport.

The Aeronautics Division functioned mostly autonomously, with anything having to do with aviation going through it. Then, in the early 2000s, the Aeronautics Division was reorganized within ADOT. The aircraft registration unit was sent to the Motor Vehicle Division, the airport development group went to the Multimodal Planning Division and Grand Canyon National Park Airport was organized under the Administrative Services Division.

Klein spent 11 years as an airport development consultant and 18 years managing four commercial service airports before coming to ADOT.

“My time there were some of my most enjoyable and productive years. My time with ADOT gave me the greatest amount of satisfaction and enjoyment.”

Nowadays, the Aeronautics Group is dedicated to dispersing grant funding to eligible capital improvement projects at qualifying airports. There are 67 airports in their system and $20 million to allocate each year. That funding is usually divided four different ways:

• Matching FAA grants for runways, taxiways, aprons etc. (90% FAA / 5% ADOT / 5% airport)
• Funding airport improvement projects directly (90% ADOT / 10% airport)
• Funding pavement maintenance (90% ADOT / 10% airport)
• Conducting planning studies, including economic impact studies of airports

According to the last Economic Impact Study (2013), aviation generates $58 billion to the state annually. Nearly 17% of all Arizona jobs are related to the aviation industry. That’s about 410,000 jobs generated, with an annual payroll of $21.1 billion. Keeping Arizona’s airports in good working order is critical to supporting one of Arizona’s most important economic assets.

The Aeronautics Groups continues to work with Arizona’s airports to make sure they remain functional to their customers. Air travel is a vital part of Arizona’s economy, and ADOT is an important piece that helps the system work.