Transform Your Flight Sim Experience
with In-Depth Tracking & Analysis
Track every flight, analyse your performance,
and master your flying skills with My FS Flights
Get 10 flights free every month!
Tracked and analysed flights over miles
Ann Arbor Municipal Airport (KARB) is a city-owned general aviation field in Washtenaw County, Michigan, sitting as an exclave of the City of Ann Arbor within Pittsfield Township. It offers a paved main runway and a seasonal grass crosswind strip, an FAA control tower, and a mix of corporate, private, medical and flight-training traffic, making it a useful and characterful destination for the VFR simulator pilot exploring the Detroit area.
Ann Arbor Municipal Airport is a general aviation field serving Washtenaw County and the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It handles mostly smaller corporate and private aircraft with no scheduled passenger or cargo service, though it is also used by aircraft supporting the University of Michigan Health System, including based medical helicopters. Its combination of a hard-surfaced main runway, a turf secondary runway, and an FAA-staffed tower gives it a genuinely varied traffic mix that makes it an interesting stop for a simulator pilot flying the Detroit region.
The airport lies within FAA Class D airspace during tower hours. It sits about 4.3 miles south of downtown Ann Arbor, physically located within Pittsfield Township even though it is owned and administered by the City of Ann Arbor, which annexed the land for water-rights purposes; part of the city's water supply is drawn from wells on the airport property. Pittsfield Township provides police and fire cover for the field but has no voting role in its management.
Ann Arbor Municipal has two physical runways. Runway 06/24 is a hard-surfaced strip 3,448 feet long, lit. Runway 12/30 is a grass strip 2,737 feet long. The grass runway crosses the paved one and is generally used during the summer months.
Detroit Approach/Departure is available on 118.95 MHz. ATIS and ASOS both broadcast on 134.55 MHz. The tower and CTAF share 120.3 MHz, with ground and clearance delivery on 121.6 MHz. UNICOM is on 123 MHz. The field has no ILS.
The published traffic pattern altitude is 1,000 feet, and traffic patterns for both runways are flown to the left. The control tower, operated by the FAA, provides air traffic control daily from 0800 to 2000 local; outside those hours the field reverts to CTAF procedures on the tower frequency. A noise abatement program is in effect, aimed at reducing the impact of airport operations on the surrounding residential areas.
The airport lies about 4.3 miles south of downtown Ann Arbor, within the built-up area of Pittsfield Township, which surrounds the airport property on all sides.
Ann Arbor Municipal Airport was built in 1928 and has long been owned and operated by the City of Ann Arbor despite lying within Pittsfield Township. An Airport Advisory Committee was established by the Ann Arbor City Council in 1961, with seven voting members appointed by the city and non-voting representatives from Pittsfield and Lodi Townships. Since the 1980s a series of proposals to extend the main runway have been put forward and repeatedly rejected or delayed; the most recent scheme, first raised in 2007, proposed lengthening the runway by 800 feet and shifting it toward the southwest corner of the site. The plan drew formal opposition from both Pittsfield and Lodi Townships, which each passed resolutions against the extension in 2009, and from a local citizens' group, the Committee for Preserving Community Quality; a further push to revive the extension arose in 2017.
The airport operates around the clock and is home to more than 180 based aircraft, housed in around 150 T-hangars along with box hangars and other leased hangar space, and handles roughly 75,000 aircraft movements a year. Two FBOs on the field offer fuel, general maintenance, aircraft parking, courtesy cars, pilot supplies and crew lounges. The FAA-operated control tower provides air traffic control daily from 8am to 8pm. The field is also used for medical flights, and the University of Michigan Health System bases its Survival Flight helicopters here, though not its fixed-wing air ambulance aircraft, owing to the tower's part-time staffing.
