Airplane Buffs Find High-Flying Life in Homes With Hangars : Housing: For Rosamond Skypark residents, who’d rather wing it than drive, their development has the convenience of a landing strip plus the camaraderie of neighbors who share their passion.
To the casual observer, the Rosamond Skypark housing development appears to be like the many dozens of new home projects that dot the Antelope Valley landscape.
There are tidy, comfortable homes with the usual carpet of lawns, interspersed with tumbleweed covered lots. These homes sit near sparsely vegetated foothills of craggy red rock and the worn remnants of a century-old gold mine with a backdrop of the picturesque Tehachapi Mountains.
But it doesn’t take long to realize something is different about this development, located about one mile north of the Los Angeles County line in Kern County.
Adjacent to each home, there are large, beige warehouse-like buildings: airplane hangars.
Known as Rosamond Skypark, each of the 28 single-story homes, which originally sold for $166,000 to $285,000, in this 104-acre development comes with an airplane hangar. Each home/hangar has an apron, taxiway and easy access to a 3,600-foot runway.
Like the golfer who lives adjacent to the links or the yachtsman who resides by the sea, residents of Rosamond Skypark make their homes most convenient to what they love to do--fly.
These are residents who fly whenever they can--from getting to work to going shopping to vacationing. And there are the countless flights to nowhere, just for the pure pleasure of it.
“I’m an airplane buff,” said Skypark resident Angel Gonzalez. “This is the only place I could have all my loved ones under the same roof--my airplane, my car, my dog, my wife and my kids.
“It’s a way of combining my hobby and home life. It worked out better for my home life.”
The flying’s always been fine at Rosamond Skypark, but residents admit the living has been sometimes difficult. The Skypark’s developers defaulted on their construction loan before finishing the project, which was to have included 60 homes and a small lodge. The fate of the unbuilt portions of the tract is uncertain.
Regardless, Rosamond Skypark was a dream come true for John Wilson, a system engineer for a television network. By moving there seven years ago, shortly after the development opened, Wilson was able to expand his flying from weekends to daily.
Wilson commutes to work in Hollywood in his Cessna 182, a single-engine, four-passenger plane, in a flight that takes about 30 minutes--shaving an hour off a driving commute and sparing him the hassles of traffic. He even plane-pools.
There are tens of thousands of people across the country who reside in fly-in communities, where the amenities include a runway.
A June, 1993 directory of residential air parks from the publication General Aviation News & Flyer list more than 300 air parks in the United States. Rosamond Skypark is one of the largest and newest of the two dozen fly-in developments in California, some of which have only a handful of aircraft based at them. There are none in Los Angeles County.
Skypark communities, residents say, offer something that is diminishing in standard single-family home developments--camaraderie. Residents share a passion that binds them.
Anytime a person’s hangar door is open, residents say visitors are welcome.
The goodwill goes beyond simple socializing. In May, 17 Rosamond neighbors flying in seven airplanes vacationed together in Mexico. This Fourth of July weekend a similar-sized Rosamond group went camping in Idaho.
“All you have to do is mention you’re going someplace and you’ll have planes following,” said resident Al Carlson, who with his wife, Teri, regularly takes vacations where they camp under the wing of their Cessna.
On Sundays, when they aren’t camping, the Carlsons fly to Van Nuys Airport. Their son meets them and they go to a nearby church, where Teri Carlson plays the organ. She said she keeps playing that distant church organ because she can get to the San Fernando Valley with a short plane ride.
There are two homeowners in the Rosamond development who do not own planes. One stores his antique car collection in his hangar; the other is a retired pilot in his 80s, who continues his lifelong love of aviation by sitting and watching the high-winged Cessnas, home-built aircraft and restored classics.
“The CC&Rs; (covenants, conditions and restrictions) doesn’t say you have to own an airplane, but it does say you have to have a hangar,” said George Fischer, president of the Rosamond Skypark Property Owners Assn. and a pilot since 1947.
Residents rely on the CC&Rs; to ensure the skypark remains when a buyer is found for the undeveloped areas. The original developers, BVS Development Inc. and Woodland American Homes Inc., defaulted on their construction loan in 1989 before completing the tract. Since then, the Resolution Trust Corp. has become the conservator of the lender, further complicating the development’s future.
The disposition of the Skypark property still has not been resolved and although some residents are frustrated, they say they want to ensure that when a new owner does complete the development, its integrity as a fly-in community is retained.
The original brochures for the Skypark said it would feature a 24-room lodge with swimming pool and spa. Those amenities have never been built.
Even before the developers’ troubles surfaced, the residents had problems. They filed suit against the developers and gained control of the property owners association, which maintains the resident-owned airstrip, open space and other common areas.
But even under residents’ ownership, the future of the 50-year-old airstrip is uncertain. Rosamond’s growth in the last several years continues to encroach on the airstrip, which was built in the 1940s by Bill Barnes, son of the famed aviator Pancho Barnes.
“(In) what we hope is a generation from now (we’ll still be) here,” Carlson said. “As development occurs and this place looks more and more like the San Fernando Valley, they’ll say ‘That noisy airport--let’s turn it into a park or a golf course.’ ”
