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First Flight Airport (KFFA) is a small public-use airfield in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, built on the very dunes where the Wright brothers achieved the first sustained powered flight on 17 December 1903. Owned by the National Park Service and sitting immediately alongside the Wright Brothers National Memorial, it offers visiting pilots a single asphalt runway and a strong sense of aviation history in one of the most storied patches of ground in the United States.
First Flight Airport is a National Park Service-owned general aviation field at Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina's Outer Banks, built on the site of the Wright brothers' pioneering glider trials and their historic first powered flight of 17 December 1903. It sits on the grounds of the Wright Brothers National Memorial, making it as much a place of pilgrimage for aviators as a working airstrip, and it remains a popular stop for pilots wanting to combine a short cross-country with a visit to the birthplace of powered flight.
The airfield lies about one nautical mile west of the central business district of Kill Devil Hills, in Dare County, North Carolina, on the grounds of the Wright Brothers National Memorial. It is an uncontrolled field with no operating control tower.
First Flight Airport has a single physical runway, 03/21, of 2,964 feet with a hard (asphalt) surface. There is no ILS.
Pilots should use the common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) of 122.9 MHz; there is no air traffic control service at the field.
There is no control tower at First Flight Airport, so arriving and departing traffic operates under standard uncontrolled-field procedures on the CTAF of 122.9 MHz.
The most prominent landmark for locating the field is the Wright Brothers National Memorial itself, a 60-foot granite pylon standing atop nearby Kill Devil Hill immediately alongside the airport, which serves as an unmistakable visual reference when approaching from the Outer Banks.
On 17 December 1903 the Wright brothers achieved the first successful powered, sustained flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft on this ground, following hundreds of earlier gliding experiments they had conducted at the site. The airfield and the adjoining Wright Brothers National Memorial commemorate that achievement, and the field was chosen as one of the stops for the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission's National Air Tour in 2003.
First Flight Airport remains in active general aviation use, recording around 37,500 aircraft operations in the twelve months to April 2018, the great majority general aviation traffic. It is owned and administered by the U.S. National Park Service and continues to draw visiting pilots keen to land at the site where powered flight began, immediately next to the Wright Brothers National Memorial.
