**By Nathaniel Pyron**
Walk the ramp at a joint-use airfield and you will see something most airfield planners never have to reconcile: a C-17 loading pallets on one apron while a scheduled airliner boards passengers on another, both of them waiting on the same strip of concrete. The FAA recognizes 21 joint-use airports in the United States — military-owned airfields where civilian airlines operate under a formal agreement — plus roughly 65 shared-use airports where the civilian authority owns the field and military units sit as tenants. Two missions, one runway, one master plan. It is some of the hardest land-use balancing in the profession.
I live next door to one of the best-known examples. At Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, the 15th Wing operates the airfield and shares the runway system with Daniel K. Inouye International Airport. Per the Air Force's own environmental review earlier this year, military aircraft account for just 6.2 percent of operations on that airfield — the other 93.8 percent is civilian. Think about what that means for the master planner: the runway is a national-defense asset, but nearly every movement on it serves a passenger or a cargo shipper. The plan has to serve both, in writing, with the military's mission protected first.
That protection starts with the joint-use agreement itself, which every planner on a shared field should read before touching a land-use map. The standard model, published in the federal code at 32 CFR Part 855, lays down the terms that shape everything I draw: government aircraft have priority over all civil aircraft at all times; civil aircraft move only under tower control and only during the hours the tower supports the military mission — any extra hours are bought and paid for by the civilian sponsor; civil operations are capped (the sample agreement sets 20,000 operations a year); and no civil aircraft may use the flying facilities for training. Touch-and-goes by student pilots are out. Every one of those constraints is a planning parameter. Training restrictions mean pattern-altitude decisions are simpler; the operations cap becomes a hard ceiling in your noise modeling and your apron sizing; the sponsor-funded tower hours go straight into the life-cycle cost picture.
On the funding side, the FAA's Military Airport Program exists precisely to convert and improve these shared fields. The FY2026 criteria, issued in November 2025, make eligible exactly the two categories a planner works with: military installations hosting both military and civil operations as a commercial-service or reliever airport, and former military airfields closed under BRAC being brought into civil service. Projects can cover the delay-reduction and capacity goals of any other Airport Improvement Program work, plus one category that caught my eye — preserving minimum airfield infrastructure at former military airports to support emergency diversion of transoceanic flights, where there is a demonstrable shortage of alternates. In the Pacific, where alternates are few and distances are vast, that line reads like a planning brief.
So what does the master planner actually do differently on a joint-use field? Nathaniel Pyron approaches it with five moves.
First, plan two airfields in one fence line. Military and civilian operations almost always share the runway system but keep separate ramps, terminals, and ground infrastructure. Draw that separation deliberately — the Air Force's sample agreement expects civil aircraft to park only in the sponsor-designated area, and the fence, the lighting, and the vehicle circulation all have to enforce it.
Second, reserve mission-priority windows. The military's priority is contractual, not theoretical: when the wing needs the pattern, it gets the pattern. The master plan should name surge periods and rehearsal windows explicitly, so the civilian sponsor can plan around them instead of discovering them.
Third, design for security you cannot share. Passenger screening, perimeter control, and force-protection standoff distances (the UFC 4-010-01 rules I wrote about yesterday's series) get more complicated when the public walks the same fence line. Site civil facilities where standoffs can be met without choking military circulation, and keep explosive-safety arcs and clear zones out of civil lease footprints — see my earlier pieces on ESQD and Part 77 for why that matters.
Fourth, plan the civil side for reversibility. BRAC conversions and surge demands mean today's terminal may need to become tomorrow's contingency ramp. Structures built under the Military Airport Program should assume a mission change, because in the Pacific the mission does change.
Fifth, treat encroachment as a joint problem. Noise contours and accident-potential zones from AICUZ studies apply to the civilian neighbor too. A joint-use field that loses its compatible land use to development loses both its missions at once — the airline's access and the wing's readiness. Coordinate with the local airport land use commission as if both users were at the table, because operationally they are.
Nathaniel Pyron learned the joint-use lesson the way most of us learn planning lessons: by standing between two stakeholders who both need the same concrete. A joint-use airfield is not a compromise between two master plans — it is one master plan that keeps both missions honest. Done right, the civilian tenant funds pavement the military could not afford alone, and the military's presence gives the community an airfield built to standards no civilian sponsor would pay for. Done wrong, it is a decade of arguments about who owns the delay. The planner's job is to make sure it is done right.
About the author
**Nathaniel Pyron** is a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport/airfield focus. A U.S. Navy veteran who served in 1995, he later spent three years as a civilian community planner working with the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia. He studied at the Arizona State University School of Urban Planning, class of 2007, and is an active LEED AP BD+C. Based in Honolulu, Hawaii, he writes about installation planning, airfield land use, and where military readiness meets community design. His LinkedIn title is Urban Planner (Land Use & Airspace).
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