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Ocracoke Island Airport (W95) is a small, remote general-aviation airstrip at the southern tip of Ocracoke Island in Hyde County, North Carolina, serving a community that has no bridge connection to the mainland. For a VFR pilot it offers one of only a handful of ways onto this isolated barrier island, the others being car and passenger ferries or private boat.
Ocracoke I (ICAO W95) sits on Ocracoke Island, the southernmost of North Carolina's Outer Banks, within Hyde County. The island has no bridge to the mainland, and access is normally by ferry, private boat, or small aircraft, which makes the airstrip a genuinely useful and characterful destination for a sim pilot wanting to reach an otherwise hard-to-get-to community surrounded by Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic.
The field lies at the southern end of Ocracoke Island, a narrow barrier island separated from the North Carolina mainland by Pamlico Sound, with the village and harbour close by. Coordinates place it at approximately 35.1012 N, 75.9660 W, at an elevation of 3 feet. No bridges link the island to the mainland; the main road, North Carolina Highway 12, instead depends on ferries to Hatteras Island, Cedar Island, and Swan Quarter on the mainland.
Ocracoke I has a single physical runway, 06/24, 2971 feet long with a hard surface. There is no ILS.
The historic Ocracoke Lighthouse and Ocracoke Harbor are prominent features of the village and useful visual landmarks for locating the island and its southern tip from the air, given the field's proximity to the settlement.
Ocracoke Island has a long and colourful history that forms the backdrop to the airfield's setting. It was a haunt of the pirate Blackbeard, who was killed there in November 1718 following a battle with Virginia troops, with local tradition placing his hideout at what is now Springer's Point. During the Second World War, German submarines attacked shipping off the island, and the remains of four British sailors washed ashore; they are buried in a small British military cemetery on Ocracoke, still honoured each year in a ceremony involving the Royal Navy, the National Park Service, and the Coast Guard.
Ocracoke Island remains accessible mainly by state ferry or private boat, with small aircraft offering one of the few alternative means of reaching the community, underlining the airstrip's practical value for a pilot planning a visit to this otherwise isolated Outer Banks village.
