Departure
91%
vs 95% ▼ 4
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
New York Stewart International Airport (KSWF) lies in the southern Hudson Valley near Newburgh, New York, a joint civil-military field operated for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey with a resident New York Air National Guard wing. Its long main runway, originally built for military jets, makes it a notable diversion field for large aircraft and gives visiting VFR pilots a straightforward, well-equipped airport to fly into within reach of the New York City area.
Stewart is a public/military airport serving the Hudson Valley, situated near Newburgh, New York, and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey through contractor AFCO AvPorts. It shares its runways with Stewart Air National Guard Base, home to the 105th Airlift Wing, and for many years also hosted a United States Marine Corps Reserve tanker squadron. For a simulator pilot the field offers an interesting mix of scheduled airline traffic, military heavy-jet movements and a runway long enough to have taken emergency diversions of very large aircraft, all set against the wooded ridges of the mid-Hudson Valley.
The airport sits in Orange County, New York, within the towns of Newburgh and New Windsor, in the southern Hudson Valley. It lies west of the city of Newburgh, south of Kingston and southwest of Poughkeepsie, roughly 60 miles (97 km) north of Manhattan and New York City. The United States Military Academy at West Point, whose cadets the airfield was originally built to train, is nearby to the south.
Stewart has two physical runways. Runway 09/27 is 9,799 feet long, hard-surfaced, lit, and equipped with an ILS. Runway 16/34 is 5,998 feet long, also hard-surfaced and lit, but without an instrument landing system. Field elevation is 463 feet.
Air traffic control is provided on Tower at 121 MHz and Ground at 121.9 MHz, with an ATIS broadcast on 124.575 MHz. New York Center covers the surrounding airspace on 132.75 MHz, and Unicom is available on 122.95 MHz. Runway 09/27 is served by an ILS for instrument approaches.
The land now occupied by Stewart was donated in 1930 by dairy farmer Samuel Stewart, at the urging of his nephew Thomas Stewart, for use as an airport by the nearby city of Newburgh. In 1934, then-West Point superintendent Douglas MacArthur proposed the site for cadet flight training, and the city sold the land to the military academy for a token sum; a gate at West Point has since been known as the Stoney Lonesome Gate. Many wartime barracks and buildings from the 1940s still stand on the property. After the Second World War the field became an Air Force base, and later, from 1966 to the end of 1974, headquarters of the 1st Region Army Air Defense Command. The Air Force deactivated the base in 1970, and it stood largely unused until 1983, when the New York Air National Guard's 105th Airlift Wing and the 213th Engineer Installation Squadron took up residence, an arrangement that continues as Stewart Air National Guard Base. The base later operated Air Force C-5 Galaxy aircraft, replaced by C-17 Globemasters in 2011, and hosted the Marine Corps Reserve's VMGR-452 tanker squadron until 2022. The airport was designated an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle, and in 1981 it was the site where the 52 American hostages released from Iran first set foot back on American soil. A later, ambitious state redevelopment plan under Governor Nelson Rockefeller led to a prolonged land dispute with local owners that ultimately reshaped New York's eminent domain law without producing the intended development. In 2000 Stewart became the first U.S. commercial airport to be privatised, when UK-based National Express took a 99-year lease; seven years later it sold the remaining lease back to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which brought in AFCO AvPorts to run the facility. The airport was rebranded New York Stewart International Airport in 2018 to highlight its proximity to New York City.
Stewart continues to operate as a dual-use airport, combining scheduled commercial air service with the military flying of the New York Air National Guard's 105th Airlift Wing based at Stewart Air National Guard Base on the airport property. As of 2023 it had 54 based aircraft and recorded around 37,000 aircraft operations in the year to April 2023. The long 09/27 runway, built to military standard, has on occasion been used for diversions of large aircraft unable to use shorter fields in the region.