Where Federal Dollars Are Building Hangars

Abstract

1. Introduction

Hangar capacity is the binding constraint on general aviation real estate in most American markets. Surveys report shortages at a majority of general aviation airports and waiting lists measured in years. The federal government spends several billion dollars a year on airport infrastructure. A reasonable person would expect those two facts to be connected, and they are, but not in the direction the spending totals suggest.

Federal airport grant awards are published airport by airport, with a project description and a breakdown by funding source. Read against the hangar line items, they answer a question that is usually addressed with anecdote: where is federal money actually building hangars, and under what authority.

The answer has two parts, and the second is the one that gets lost. Federal hangar funding is small, dispersed and concentrated at small fields, which is the pattern the eligibility rules would predict. But the growth in it over the last three fiscal years comes almost entirely from a temporary infrastructure program that does not carry those rules, and it has gone to airports the permanent program excludes from hangar funding by statute. A five-year total that mixes the two describes a policy that does not exist.

Section 2 sets out the data and the method, including the attribution limit that constrains every figure in the paper. Section 3 separates the funding sources. Section 4 states the eligibility gate that explains the pattern. Section 5 reports what the files show. Section 6 addresses the changes made by the 2024 reauthorization. Section 7 describes how hangars are financed when federal money will not reach them. Section 8 states the limitations.

2. Data and Method

2.1 The grant files

The Federal Aviation Administration publishes grant histories for fiscal years 1996 onward, with detailed grant reports in spreadsheet form for recent years (Federal Aviation Administration 2026a). This paper uses the files for fiscal years 2021 through 2025, comprising 17,583 grant rows.

Each row records one grant and carries the state, city, airport name, location identifier, sponsor, grant number, award date, a project summary and a total amount, with the amount broken out across funding source columns. Those columns are what make the analysis possible: entitlement, discretionary, discretionary noise, discretionary military airport program and supplemental discretionary are Airport Improvement Program money, while the columns for Airport Infrastructure Grants, the Airport Terminal Program, contract towers and pandemic relief are not.

2.2 Identifying hangar work

Project summaries use a controlled vocabulary of roughly 340 work items, comma separated. Hangar work appears as three strings: construct or expand hangar, construct or modify or improve or rehabilitate hangar, and reconstruct hangar. Those three account for 797 occurrences across the five years, so hangar projects are cleanly identifiable without judgment about what counts.

Two adjustments are applied and both are described here rather than buried, because one of them is easy to state inaccurately.

Pandemic relief dollars are netted out. The grants themselves stay in the analysis; what is removed is the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan money inside them. That is a narrower operation than excluding the grants, and it has to be described as such, because the usual justification for excluding pandemic relief does not hold here. Thirty-three hangar-bearing grants carry $67,587,814 of pandemic relief money, and thirteen of those are hangar construction funded entirely from pandemic relief, totalling $65,928,853. Two of them are larger than the largest recipient in Table 4: Florence Regional in South Carolina at $9,809,334 and Pitt-Greenville in North Carolina at $9,799,463, both fiscal 2022, both coded as hangar construction, both 100 percent CARES Act. These were capital projects, not operating support, and Section 5.4 reports the totals with them included.

State-level aggregate rows are excluded, because the agency reports those at the program level rather than the airport level and an airport count cannot be built from them. The exclusion drops every row whose location identifier begins with an asterisk, which covers block grant program rows, state system planning rows and rows recorded as various locations within a state. Only the block grant rows carry hangar work, so the result is unaffected, and Section 5.5 reports what sits inside them.

2.3 What cannot be separated

Dollars are reported per grant, not per work item, and many grants bundle hangar work with taxiway, apron or lighting work in the same award. Nothing in the published data permits a split. Every hangar figure in this paper is therefore an upper bound that attributes a whole grant to hangar work whenever the project summary mentions a hangar.

The lower bound is computable and is reported alongside it. Counting only grants whose every work item is hangar work gives $239.5 million against the $289.4 million upper bound, so the true figure lies within a band of roughly 17 percent. Analyses that report a single hangar number without this caveat are reporting the upper bound and calling it a measurement.

3. The Federal Money, Correctly Labelled

3.1 The Airport Improvement Program is not the whole number

Aggregate federal airport grant funding over the five years does not come from one program, and the difference is large.

Table 1. Federal airport grant funding by program, fiscal years 2021 to 2025.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a), fiscal years 2021 through 2025.

Airport Improvement Program funding over the five years is $18.93 billion. A figure near $28.5 billion is reachable only by adding infrastructure law and terminal program money and removing pandemic relief and the block grant aggregates, and about one third of the resulting total is not Airport Improvement Program money.

The authorization confirms that arithmetic independently. The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 amended 49 U.S.C. 48103(a) to authorize $3.35 billion for fiscal 2024 and $4.0 billion for each of fiscal years 2025 through 2028 (Pub. L. No. 118-63, sec. 101(a), 138 Stat. 1033). No five-year total near $28 billion is available from the permanent program at those levels.

The Department of Transportation's inspector general treats the programs as distinct for the same reason, noting that the infrastructure law provides "$20 billion over fiscal years 2022-2026 for three grant programs" and that those programs "can fund certain types of projects, such as construction of gates and related areas for passenger boarding, that are not typically eligible for AIP funding" (Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General 2025, highlights p. 1 and pp. 6-7). The same report quantifies the divergence: from a review of every infrastructure law grant issued in fiscal 2022 and 2023, the inspector general "identified 18 IIJA grants, totaling more than $183 million, for projects that include terminal work on gates and related areas that would not normally be eligible under AIP" (ibid., 7).

The appropriation itself sets the scale and the end date. The infrastructure law provided $15 billion for Airport Infrastructure Grants and $5 billion for the Airport Terminal Program, both available until 30 September 2030, allocated as $3 billion and $1 billion a year respectively for fiscal years 2022 through 2026, and both "derived from the general fund of the Treasury" rather than from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund (Pub. L. No. 117-58, div. J, tit. VIII, 135 Stat. 1416-1418). Those two figures are what make the composition finding in Section 5 legible: a $3 billion a year general fund appropriation with different eligibility rules, running alongside a roughly $3.5 to $4 billion a year trust fund program, for five years and then not.

3.2 Hangar-directed dollars

Grants mentioning hangar work total $289.4 million across 338 airports over the five years. Split by source, the composition is the finding.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a). Upper bound on whole-grant attribution; see Section 2.3.

Hangar work therefore accounts for about six tenths of one percent of Airport Improvement Program spending over the period, and the majority of all federal hangar dollars came from a temporary program rather than the permanent one. Section 4 explains why that had to be so.

4. The Eligibility Gate

4.1 The statute

A hangar is a revenue producing aeronautical support facility, defined by statute to include "fuel farms, hangar buildings, self-service credit card aeronautical fueling systems, air plane wash racks, major rehabilitation of a hangar owned by a sponsor, or other aeronautical support facilities that the Secretary determines will increase the revenue producing ability of the airport" (49 U.S.C. 47102(24)).

Construction costs for such a facility are allowable only under a narrow provision: the Secretary may allow them "for an airport development project at a nonprimary airport if the Government's share of such costs is paid only with funds apportioned to the airport sponsor under section 47114(c)(1)(D) or section 47114(d)(2)(A) and if the Secretary determines that the sponsor has made adequate provision for financing airside needs of the airport" (49 U.S.C. 47110(h)).

Three conditions follow from that sentence. The airport must be nonprimary. The federal share must come from a named apportionment rather than from discretionary or state apportionment money. And airside needs must be provided for first. The general aviation entitlement at 49 U.S.C. 47114(d)(2)(A) is $150,000 a year, which may be banked for up to four years, so the ordinary federal contribution available to a hangar project at a general aviation field is on the order of $600,000.

4.2 The handbook

The program handbook implements that statute in a single table row covering hangars, fixed base operator buildings and maintenance buildings (Federal Aviation Administration 2019b, app. O, tbl. O-3, row f, at O-6 to O-7). Its conditions restate the statute and add operational detail:

"Per 49 USC 47110(h), the airport must be a nonprimary airport." "Only nonprimary entitlements funding may be used for the building." And: "Per 49 USC 47110(h), the sponsor must certify that all airfield needs have been accommodated before the ADO can fund a revenue producing aeronautical support facilities. Per FAA policy, the sponsor must adequately demonstrate to the ADO that airside needs within the next three years (current fiscal year and next two future fiscal years) will be accommodated through local funds or nonprimary entitlement funds."

The same row limits rehabilitation of a sponsor-owned hangar to major rehabilitation, requires use to be solely aeronautical and prohibits storage of non-aircraft property, and treats apron in front of a hangar that cannot serve public parking, together with any taxilane exclusively serving the hangar, as part of the hangar and subject to the hangar rules. That last provision matters for anyone reading these files: apron work adjacent to a hangar does not escape the hangar restrictions by being called apron.

The prohibited projects appendix states the converse directly, barring "Revenue producing aeronautical support facilities at other than nonprimary and Military Airport Program airports" (Federal Aviation Administration 2019b, app. C, item 42, at C-11). The military airport program is the one carve-out, and the handbook states it expressly: for those airports "the normal AIP restrictions for hangars do not apply," subject to a cap of $7 million per airport per year and 50,000 square feet under 49 U.S.C. 47118(f).

Agency policy adds a further screen. A sponsor must demonstrate that the airport meets safety critical standards for runway protection zones and runway safety areas, and "[i]f an airport's capital improvement plan (CIP) identifies a need for Discretionary/State funding in the next three years, the FAA will not approve funding for a revenue-producing facility" (Federal Aviation Administration 2022). That guidance is issued by the agency's Central Region rather than nationally, it is dated 2 August 2022, and it still quotes a statutory cross-reference that later amendment superseded. It is used here as a statement of how one region applies the policy, which is the level at which these decisions are actually made, and not as a current national rule.

4.3 The priority equation

Projects are ranked by a national priority rating computed as NPR = ((4A) + (2C) + (0.7P) + (0.7T)) / 4.2, where A is an airport code, C a component code, P a purpose code and T a type code, producing a score between 1 and 100 (Federal Aviation Administration 2019a, para. 5.7.3.1 and app. E at E-1).

Hangars sit low on two of the four inputs. In the type code table, hangar and T-hangar carry a value of 8, against 100 for safety area, obstruction and rescue and firefighting (Federal Aviation Administration 2019a, tbl. E-4). In the component code table, revenue producing carries 10, against 90 for runway, 80 for taxiway and 65 for apron (Federal Aviation Administration 2019a, tbl. E-3). Those two figures come from different tables and are not on a common scale, so the comparison sometimes drawn between a hangar's 8 and a runway's 90 is not a like comparison; both values nonetheless push the same direction.

The practical effect is that a hangar project and a runway project at the same airport enter the queue at very different heights, because two of the four inputs differ sharply and the airport code is common to both. This paper does not print a worked score, because reproducing one requires purpose and airport code selections that the published tables do not determine uniquely for a given project, and a score that cannot be reproduced from the source is not worth quoting. What the tables do establish, and what matters here, is the ranking: revenue producing work sits at the bottom of the component scale and hangars at the bottom of the type scale.

5. What the Data Shows

5.1 Nothing reaches a large hub

Across five fiscal years, federal hangar funding to large hub airports is zero. Funding to medium hubs is also zero. This is not a small number or a rounding artifact; no grant at any of those airports carries hangar work in its project summary.

Table 3. Hangar-directed federal funding by NPIAS airport role, fiscal years 2021 to 2025.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a), joined to airport roles in Federal Aviation Administration (2025), appendix A. Counts and dollars are both computed over the 338 airports receiving AIP or infrastructure law hangar money. One location identifier carrying $260,334 does not appear in appendix A and is reported on its own line rather than assigned a role.

Restricting to Airport Improvement Program money alone moves the distribution further toward general aviation, from 71.5 percent of all hangar dollars to 84.6 percent, and the small hub share falls to zero. That is the eligibility gate in Section 4 showing up in the data: the one small hub in the table, Blue Grass, received hangar money entirely from the infrastructure law.

The program is dispersed rather than concentrated. Median hangar funding per airport is $655,822, and the ten largest recipients account for only 16.7 percent of the total. This is a small-grant program distributed across hundreds of fields, which is what an entitlement capped at $150,000 a year produces at the general aviation end of the system.

5.2 The growth is infrastructure law money

Hangar funding rose from $15.1 million in fiscal 2021 to $151.5 million in fiscal 2025, a tenfold increase. Airport Infrastructure Grants account for essentially all of it.

That program carries none of the section 47110(h) conditions, and the data shows what follows. Restricted to Airport Improvement Program money alone, the general aviation share rises from 71.5 percent to 84.6 percent and the small hub share falls to zero. The primary commercial airports that appear in the hangar data appear there because a temporary program reached them, not because the permanent program changed.

The Texas aviation capital improvement program states the rule from the state side in one sentence: "NPE and IIJA funds are the only federal sources that can be spent on revenue-generating projects such as hangars and fuel systems (if airside needs are met)" (Texas Department of Transportation 2025, 3).

5.3 Where the dollars land

The ten largest recipients over the five years, with the funding source split, are set out below. The list is tightly packed at the bottom: ranks 9 and 10 are separated by $56, and rank 11 sits $31,024 below rank 10.

Table 4. Ten largest recipients of hangar-directed federal funding, fiscal years 2021 to 2025.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a, 2025). Whole-grant attribution; see Section 2.3.

Seven of the top ten are primary commercial service airports, and six of those seven received no Airport Improvement Program hangar money at all. The list is therefore not a ranking of small general aviation fields, even though general aviation airports take 71.5 percent of the dollars in aggregate. Both statements are true because the distribution has a long tail of small awards and a short head of infrastructure law awards at larger fields.

Two of the largest entries in the top ten sit awkwardly with the eligibility rule set out in Section 4, and the discrepancy is worth confronting rather than leaving for a reader to find. Thief River Falls, ranked first, received its $7,500,000 in a single fiscal 2022 grant funded entirely from supplemental discretionary. Marquette/Sawyer, ranked second, received its $7,405,206 in two grants funded entirely from ordinary discretionary, at a primary nonhub airport, which is the combination the revenue-producing facility policy forecloses. Section 5.4 decomposes the whole AIP figure by funding column and explains what is going on.

5.4 What the funding columns actually say

The grant files carry a separate dollar column for each funding authority, so the $113.8 million described here as Airport Improvement Program hangar money can be decomposed rather than assumed.

Table 5. Airport Improvement Program hangar dollars by funding column, fiscal years 2021 to 2025.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a), funding columns as published.

Roughly a fifth of it is not entitlement money. Three of the four cases have an explanation and the fourth does not.

The discretionary money at Marquette/Sawyer is military airport program money that the file cannot show as such. Sawyer was selected under the fiscal 2018 military airport program and redesignated for a further five-year term, and the agency's notice states in terms that the selection "allows hangar rehabilitation and expansion projects to proceed" (Federal Aviation Administration 2019). That program exists precisely to fund "projects not generally funded by the AIP," hangars among them. The reason it appears as ordinary discretionary is a schema artefact: the fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 workbooks have no military airport program column at all, which first appears in the fiscal 2024 file. So military airport program money in the early years is invisible inside the generic discretionary column, and an analyst who does not know that will misread it.

Supplemental discretionary is a different instrument again. It is appropriated from the General Fund by annual appropriations acts rather than from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, and the agency administers it "consistent with Airport Improvement Program (AIP) sponsor and project eligibility" without it being AIP money in the statutory sense. Auburn/Lewiston and Beatrice Municipal fall in this category.

Thief River Falls is the case this paper cannot explain. Its entire $7,500,000, the biggest hangar award of the five years, is supplemental discretionary at a nonprimary commercial service airport, and the revenue-producing facility policy provides that state apportionment and discretionary funds cannot be used for the federal share. It is reported here as an unexplained outlier rather than smoothed over, and anyone with access to the project file is invited to correct the record.

The wider point is methodological, and it applies to any analysis built on these files. Describing the permanent program's hangar money as nonprimary entitlement money is right for four fifths of it and wrong for the rest, and the difference is visible only if the funding columns are read rather than the totals.

5.5 Everything the airport-level figures leave out

Two categories of federal hangar money do not appear in the figures above, and together they are larger than the Airport Improvement Program total.

The first is pandemic relief. Including the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan dollars inside hangar-bearing grants raises the five-year total from $289.4 million to $356,960,407.

Table 6. All federal dollars inside hangar-bearing grants, fiscal years 2021 to 2025.

Source: Author's computation from Federal Aviation Administration (2026a).

Counted this way the paper's central finding gets stronger rather than weaker. Sixty-eight percent of federal hangar money over the five years came from two temporary appropriations, the infrastructure law and pandemic relief, neither of which carries the conditions in 49 U.S.C. 47110(h), and both of which have now ended. The permanent program supplied under a third of it.

Two figures in this paper move once pandemic money is counted, and both are stated here so that nothing depends on the choice of basis. Fiscal 2021 hangar funding is $29,239,808 rather than $15.1 million, which makes the rise to fiscal 2025 a factor of 5.2 rather than ten. And the general aviation share falls from 71.5 percent to 58.3 percent while primary nonhub rises from 17.8 to 29.3 percent, because the large pandemic-funded hangar projects were at primary commercial airports. Large and medium hubs remain at zero on every basis tested.

The second category is state block grant money. In the ten states that administer their own general aviation grants under the state block grant program (Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General 2021, n.11), hangar work appears in program-level rows that cannot be attributed to individual airports: Georgia $28,112,434, Tennessee $28,018,720, North Carolina $25,791,596, Missouri $17,266,969, Wisconsin $8,553,919, Pennsylvania $6,772,642, Illinois $5,377,708, Michigan $3,244,449 and Texas $2,250,653. The total is $125,389,090, which is more than the entire Airport Improvement Program hangar figure reported in this paper. A study built on airport-level rows necessarily understates federal hangar support in block grant states, and by a large margin.

5.6 Independent corroboration

Independent evidence supports the aggregate pattern. The national plan of integrated airport systems places hangars in an "Other" development category that "accounts for about 1.9 percent ($1.3 billion) of the total development in the NPIAS" against a total need of $67.5 billion, and reports that "[n]onprimary airports account for 75 percent of this development" (Federal Aviation Administration 2025, 27). The Government Accountability Office states the eligibility position plainly, listing hangars among projects that "are not eligible for AIP funding," and reports that smaller airports received roughly 75 percent of AIP funding while averaging $897,000 per grant against $5 million for larger airports (Government Accountability Office 2020, 35, 14).

6. What the 2024 Reauthorization Changed

Two provisions of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 bear on hangars, and both are narrower than the discussion around them suggested.

Section 709(4) amends 49 U.S.C. 47110(h) by striking the reference to section 47114(d)(3)(A) and inserting "section 47114(c)(1)(D) or section 47114(d)(2)(A)," which adds the nonprimary commercial service apportionment to the sources available for a revenue producing facility. Section 789 directs the Administrator, within twenty-four months, to update the list of actions presumed to conform to a state implementation plan under 40 C.F.R. 93.153(f) "to include projects relating to the construction of aircraft hangars," which removes an environmental review step rather than supplying money.

A third provision changes the arithmetic without changing eligibility: section 708 adds 49 U.S.C. 47109(h), setting a 95 percent federal share for grants to nonhub and nonprimary airports in fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

What the Act did not do is as important. It did not repeal the nonprimary-only restriction, the airside needs certification, the restriction to nonprimary entitlement funds, or the low priority rating. The gate described in Section 4 stands.

7. How Hangars Actually Get Built

If the federal program will not build revenue producing hangars at scale, something else does. Three mechanisms carry the load, and each is documented.

State loan and grant programs. Minnesota operates a hangar loan program offering "[a]n 80% interest-free loan to state system airports for building new hangars," repaid in equal monthly installments over twenty years (Minnesota Department of Transportation 2026). Nebraska runs a revolving hangar program through its aeronautics division, and Iowa established a general aviation hangar revolving loan fund with named awards for hangar construction at individual fields (Iowa Legislative Services Agency 2002). Texas takes the grant route at larger scale: its 2026 to 2028 capital improvement program totals $585.9 million, of which $271.5 million is state money, more than the $228.2 million federal share, and state funds are directed at "publicly owned facilities that are not otherwise eligible for federal funding," including named hangar line items (Texas Department of Transportation 2025).

Private development under ground lease. The most common route is for a tenant to build at its own expense on leased airport land, with the improvements reverting to the sponsor at the end of the term. Federal law addresses that transaction directly, and it is the statutory foundation of the mechanism this section describes. A sponsor that has accepted federal funds agrees that "if the airport owner or operator and a person who owns an aircraft agree that a hangar is to be constructed at the airport for the aircraft at the aircraft owner's expense, the airport owner or operator will grant to the aircraft owner for the hangar a long-term lease that is subject to such terms and conditions on the hangar as the airport owner or operator may impose" (49 U.S.C. 47107(a)(21), implemented as Grant Assurance 38). So the same federal framework that will not fund the hangar obliges the sponsor to grant a lease for one built privately, with the term undefined and every other condition reserved to the sponsor. Georgia's aviation guidance describes the structure and the federal constraints on it, including that the term "must not exceed a period of years that is reasonably necessary to amortize a tenants investment and provide a reasonable rate of return," that terms in excess of fifty years are to be avoided, and that the agency "recommends the title to tenant facilities vest in or revert to the airport sponsor at the expiration of the lease" (Georgia Department of Transportation 2024, 7, 12 to 13). The valuation consequences of that structure are developed in Carter (2026a).

Local and sponsor funding. Georgia's statewide hangar study puts a number on the gap. It inventories 1,298 hangar structures holding about 4,828 spaces, 46 percent airport owned and 54 percent privately owned, identifies unmet demand for 1,405 additional spaces costing roughly $450 million to build, plus $11.8 million to replace thirty failed structures, and concludes that "the majority of all hangar construction projects are funded locally by airport sponsors or private developers" (Georgia Department of Transportation 2023, 36). Set the $450 million of unmet demand in one state against $289.4 million of federal hangar funding nationwide over five years and the relative scale of the federal contribution is apparent.

8. Limitations

Whole-grant attribution is the binding limitation and it cannot be relieved with published data. Every hangar figure here counts the entire grant whenever the project summary mentions hangar work, so $289.4 million is an upper bound; the all-hangar-items lower bound is $239.5 million. Figures for role shares and rankings inherit the same bias, and an airport whose hangar grant also funded a taxiway appears larger than its hangar work alone would justify.

Two adjustments shape the result and both cut the same way. Pandemic relief dollars are netted out of hangar-bearing grants, which understates federal hangar support by $67.6 million, and thirteen of those grants were hangar construction funded entirely from pandemic relief. State block grant program rows are excluded because they are reported at the program level, which understates it by a further $125.4 million. Section 5.5 reports both totals so that a reader can weigh the effect, and every headline figure that moves on the alternative basis is stated there. A different analyst could defend including either. The composition finding survives both choices; the growth multiple and the role shares do not.

The funding columns are not uniform across the five files. The military airport program column first appears in the fiscal 2024 workbook, so military airport program money in fiscal 2021 and 2022 is indistinguishable from ordinary discretionary, and Section 5.4 shows one case where that matters. The number of columns runs from 16 to 19 across the five years and the header row sits at a different height in each file, which anyone replicating this analysis will need to handle.

Fiscal year files carry different as-of dates, with the fiscal 2021 file published cumulative to mid-2023 and later files current to their own dates, so small revisions are possible if the agency republishes. The airport count of 338 rests on distinct location identifiers; counting by worksite name gives 339, and any deduplication rule will move the figure by one or two.

Finally, this paper measures federal obligations, not hangars. A grant is not a building. Nothing here establishes how many hangar spaces were delivered, at what cost per space, or whether the projects funded were the ones with the highest unmet demand. That study would need project-level completion data the agency does not publish in these files.

9. Conclusion

Federal hangar funding is small, dispersed and, in its permanent form, confined by statute to airports without significant commercial service. Over five fiscal years it reached 338 airports at a median of about $656,000 each, and not one dollar of it reached a large or medium hub.

The finding that matters for anyone reading these files is the composition. Sixty-one percent of federal hangar dollars over the period came from a temporary infrastructure program that does not carry the section 47110(h) conditions, and that program accounts for essentially all of the tenfold growth since fiscal 2021. Strip it out and the permanent program returns to form, with general aviation airports taking 82 percent of the dollars and primary small hubs taking none. A five-year total that combines the two, labels it Airport Improvement Program money and infers a policy from it has described something that was never enacted.

For an owner or developer, the practical reading is unchanged by any of this. The federal contribution available to a hangar project at a general aviation field is an entitlement of $150,000 a year, bankable for four, conditioned on a certification about airside needs, and ranked near the bottom of the priority equation. Hangars get built on state loans, sponsor capital and private money under ground lease, and the last of those is why the terms of the lease, rather than the cost of the building, decide what the asset is worth.

This paper is research and general information for professionals evaluating aviation real estate. It is not appraisal, legal, or tax advice, and it does not create an engagement. Grant figures are the author's computation from published federal files and are subject to the attribution limits stated in Sections 2.3 and 8.

References

49 U.S.C. 47102(24) (revenue producing aeronautical support facilities); 47102(28) (terminal development); 47107(a)(21) (hangar construction lease obligation); 47110(h) (allowable costs); 47117(b)(1) (banking of entitlement funds); 47114(c)(1)(D) and 47114(d)(2)(A) (apportionments); 47118(f) (military airport program); 48103(a) (authorizations). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/47110

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Georgia Department of Transportation. 2024. Managing and Leasing Aircraft Hangars: Best Practices for Public Use Airports in Georgia, April. https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Aviation/Documents/Planning/GDOT_HangarGuide_BestPractices.pdf

Government Accountability Office. 2020. Airport Infrastructure: Information on Funding and Financing for Planned Projects. GAO-20-298, February. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-298.pdf

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Pub. L. No. 117-58, div. J, tit. VIII, 135 Stat. 1416-1418 (2021) (Airport Infrastructure Grants and Airport Terminal Program appropriations).

Iowa Legislative Services Agency. 2002. Aviation Assistance Programs. Issue Review, November 21. https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/IR/1249.pdf

Minnesota Department of Transportation. 2026. Hangar Loan Program, Office of Aeronautics. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/aero/airportdevelopment/needsmeeting/Hangar%20Loan%20Handout.pdf

Nebraska Department of Transportation. 2026. Revolving Hangar Program, Division of Aeronautics. https://dot.nebraska.gov/aeronautics

Texas Department of Transportation. 2025. Aviation Capital Improvement Program 2026-2028, Executive Summary. https://www.txdot.gov/content/dam/docs/division/avn/acip-2026-2028-exec-summary.pdf