Departure
97%
vs 95% ▲ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Quillayute Airport is a quiet, city-owned general aviation field on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, some 10 miles west of Forks and close to the Pacific coast near La Push. Built as a wartime naval air station and later converted to civilian use, it retains two long hard runways that make it a useful strip for pilots exploring this remote, heavily forested corner of the state.
Quillayute Airport is a public-use aerodrome owned by the City of Forks, located in a sparsely populated stretch of the Olympic Peninsula in Clallam County, Washington. Originally built as a military airfield, it now serves general aviation traffic visiting the surrounding coastal and forest country, and its generous wartime-era runways are unusually long for the level of traffic the field now sees.
The airport lies in uncontrolled airspace roughly 10 miles (16 km) west of the town of Forks, Washington, and about a mile southwest of the small community of Quillayute itself, on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula near the Pacific coast and the settlement of La Push. It sits at coordinates 47.9366, -124.563 and an elevation of 180 feet.
Quillayute has two paved runways. Runway 13/31 is 4,567 feet long with a hard surface, and runway 04/22 is 4,183 feet long, also hard-surfaced. Both are relics of the airfield's naval origins and are considerably longer than needed for current light aircraft traffic; a third runway, oriented roughly north-south, has been closed for some years.
Pilots should monitor the common traffic advisory frequency 122.9 MHz for airfield operations, as there is no air traffic control tower. An automated surface observing system (ASOS) broadcasts weather on 135.225 MHz. There is no ILS or other precision approach aid at the field.
The airfield lies close to the Pacific coastline and the mouth of the Quillayute River near La Push, with the town of Forks and the forested Olympic Peninsula terrain to the east providing useful orientation for VFR pilots approaching from inland.
Quillayute began life as a naval auxiliary air station, reflecting the strategic importance of the Washington coast during the Second World War, and its runways were laid out at a scale well beyond civilian requirements of the time. The Washington State Department of Transportation later took on the field before deeding it to the City of Forks in 1999. Over the years one of the original runways, aligned roughly north-south, was closed, while the remaining east-west runway has at times carried a displaced threshold, with long-term planning aimed at eventually removing that displacement and potentially reopening the closed runway at a shorter length.
The airport covers about 739 acres and remains in general aviation use, with a small amount of military activity; for the twelve months ending December 2022 it recorded some 6,700 aircraft operations, of which roughly 97 percent were general aviation and 3 percent military. It continues to be owned and managed by the City of Forks, serving as a gateway for pilots visiting the Olympic Peninsula's coastal and forest areas.