Departure
99%
vs 95% ▲ 4
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Wilkes County Airport (KUKF), known to the FAA as UKF and to airlines as IKB, is a general aviation field lying about four miles northeast of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina. It offers a single long, lit runway with an ILS approach and is home to a substantial corporate fleet operated by the relief organisation Samaritan's Purse.
Wilkes County Airport sits in the foothills of Wilkes County, North Carolina, a few miles northeast of the town of North Wilkesboro. It is a public general aviation airport rather than an airline field, and its principal claim to fame among sim pilots and spotters alike is that it hosts the executive fleet of the Christian relief organisation Samaritan's Purse, which bases King Air turboprops, Falcon jets, a Gulfstream G550 and a Cessna 208 Caravan there. The combination of a long hard runway, an ILS approach and a busy corporate ramp makes it an interesting stop for anyone flying business or turboprop types in the region.
The airport lies close to North Wilkesboro, in the Wilkes County area of northwestern North Carolina. It is an uncontrolled field with no operating control tower, and arriving or departing traffic working under instrument flight rules is worked by Atlanta Approach/Departure on 125.15 MHz. Visual traffic uses the common frequency for calls in the local area.
Wilkes County Airport has a single physical runway, 01/19, oriented roughly north-south. It is 6,160 feet long with a hard (asphalt/concrete) surface and is lit for night operations. An instrument landing system serves runway 01, giving precision guidance for approaches from the south.
Traffic and IFR arrivals/departures are handled by Atlanta Approach/Departure on 125.15 MHz. The field has an AWOS-3 automated weather observing system broadcasting on 126.625 MHz. Raleigh Radio, the local flight service station frequency, is available on 122.4 MHz. Airport advisory calls and unicom traffic use 122.7 MHz, which serves as the CTAF/unicom frequency for an uncontrolled field of this type. Runway 01 is equipped with an ILS for instrument approaches.
The present Wilkes County Airport is the third airfield to have served the area. The original North Wilkesboro Airport opened in the early 1900s with a grass east-west runway, later extended in the 1960s to 2,300 feet, on a site now occupied by a medical park in the town. Between 1962 and 1963 this was superseded by an earlier Wilkes County Airport built about 1.5 miles to the southwest, which had a longer, paved 3,600-foot runway oriented northeast-southwest, with a ramp and three buildings to its south. That field was further improved in the 1980s, when the runway was lengthened to 4,250 feet and the ramp expanded to six buildings, before it was closed in the late 1980s and replaced by the current Wilkes County Airport.
Today the airport functions as a general aviation facility handling a mix of corporate and personal aircraft traffic, with reported activity in the range of several thousand to nearly 23,000 operations a year. It is notably the home base for the executive aircraft fleet of Samaritan's Purse, which operates King Air, Falcon Jet, Gulfstream G550 and Cessna Caravan types from the field.